If I’ve learned anything from the films of Godard, it’s to what degree structure and convention bind other films. I most recently saw his Alphaville but that took place in a future Paris overruled by an omniscient, evil computer and therefore had an excuse to be wacky. Two or Three Things I Know About Her is even more unconventional because it contains the same non-sequitur philosophizing of language/meaning, thought/reality and change/stasis as Alphaville but takes place in present-day Paris (1966), all ennui and contemporary fashions in Kool-Aid colors. Characters address the camera directly, talking off-handedly about what they’re doing, what they’ve done and what they’re going to do. The narrator whispers every time he speaks. A child asks his mother what language is and she replies, “Language is the house man lives in.” You know: the sort of stuff that gets French films slapped as snotty and ponderous.
I liked it anyway, although the frequent cuts to cranes, dump trucks and the construction of skyscrapers confused me. There’s a token American in the film played by a Frenchman who speaks loud, stilted English and introduces himself as John Bogus, a Vietnam War profiteer from Arkansas. He’s wearing a white T-shirt with an American flag on it and even the flame from his cigarette lighter seems blatantly outsized and particularly American. Which is fair enough considering Americans’ takes on stock French characters. (See: Inspector Clouseau and any maître d’ character ever.)
The soundtrack dips in and out and at times disappears. Conversations are overlaid with occasional orchestral snippets but mostly diegetic sounds: traffic, a toy gun, people talking, a pinball machine. The plot has something to do with a woman (Maria Vlady) wandering Paris as a sort-of weekly, half-hearted prostitute to amuse herself while her husband’s off at work. There’s a scene in the film of one guy reading random sentences from a giant stack of paperbacks as another guy transcribes everything, and I wondered if it wasn’t commentary on the abstract dialogue of Two or Three Things itself. “If you can’t afford LSD, try color TV,” whispers the narrator as part of a litany reminiscent of Renton’s “Choose Life” soliloquy from Trainspotting. And if you have neither mind-bending drugs nor television, just watch Two or Three Things I Know About Her.