day and night
by Douglas Messerli
Catherine Vimenet and Jean-Luc Godard
(writers), Jean-Luc Godard (director) Deux
ou Trois choses que je sais d'elle (Two
or Three Things I Know About Her) / 1967, USA 1968
Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 film Two or Three Things I Know About Her,
appeared during a period when his films were not only moving to more political
concerns and, despite his love of all things American earlier his career, a
time in which Godard was shifting to a strong anti-American sentiment.
These are very much the issues of this film, which is not a typical film
narrative as much as it is a kind of essay on the condition of all things
French in relationship to the seemingly endless involvement in Viet Nam, which
I think it is important to remember, began with the French political and social
commitment to that country years earlier.
It’s clear that Godard is highly disturbed throughout by not only the
appropriation of American values on French culture, but the culture’s own appropriation
of itself; one of the central scenes takes place in a bookstore where a writer
and his assistant quote passages randomly out of piles of nearby books,
presumably creating a collage of narrative fiction, which might almost describe
Godard’s own methods in some part.
One might also describe this work as a critique of a world, so
influenced by US values, that “she (France),” too has turned into a kind of
consumer world, in which even the bourgeois housewife at the center of this
work, Juliette Jeanson (Marina Vlady) turns herself into a commodity, loaning
out her body to loveless encounters each day to earn a little extra cash in
order to purchase the new dresses, washing machines, and other products for
which she also daily shops.
Underneath her everyday movements of shopping, housework and
child-rearing, the voice of Godard himself, kept to a near whisper, speaks of
the attempt by the French government in their attempts to build major new
communities on the edge of Paris, critiques the current politics, and attacks
the US involvement in Viet Nam. These seemingly ordinary events accordingly are
connected with global governmental forces who, the voice argues, are working to
make all of us into mindless consumers—not only of products, but non-events,
and even unemotional relationships.
At one point, Juliette visits the garage where her husband works to get
the car washed, her best friend, also a day-time prostitute, having joined her.
Her apparently near sexless husband greets her simply as if she were another
customer, simply briefly conversing with her, before sending her on her way.
How
different is Juliette’s day-time sexual activities from that of the central
character of Buñuel’s heroine in Belle de
Jour, a film made the very same year, and released a couple of months
later. Séverine Serizy, married to a handsome
doctor, is obsessed by the sexual secrecies of being a day-time prostitute,
excited by her new encounters, particularly with a handsome young thug,
Marcel—who ultimately turns her everyday life into a position of being a kind
of nurse to her doctor husband.
The sexual activities of Juliette, on the other hand, are absolutely
banal and as aesthetically boring as the dresses and products she purchases.
Her dresses are clearly mass-produced pieces, usually in stripes, whereas Catherine
Deneuve in Belle de Jour wore dresses
designed by St-Laurent. If Séverine lives with a handsome man, who clearly
loves her, Juliette lives with a mechanic who believes life consists of
working, eating, and sleeping; along with a constantly crying young boy, she
does not live in a stylish Paris apartment, but in the bland high-rise that
government has built to house its poorer citizens.
In
fact, the “her” of this film is not simply the mindless female protagonist, but
is, given the French feminine endings of so many words in the language, many
other things, a thing that stands in for all those “others.” As the promotional
film poster argued, “her” is the subject of a great many things:
HER, the cruelty of neo-capitalism
HER, prostitution
HER, the Paris region
HER, the bathroom that 70% of the French don't
have
HER, the terrible law of huge building
complexes
HER, the physical side of love
HER, the life of today
HER, the war in Vietnam
HER, the modern call-girl
HER, the death of modern beauty
HER, the circulation of ideas
HER, the gestapo of structures
Yet, ironically, as the title of Godard’s film admits, he only knows 2
or 3 things about “her,” and evidently about all these other issues. This film,
after all, is not a listing of endless grievances, but a kind of playful
discussion about the problems of mid-20th century life in Paris, given the
world which surrounds it. If that world has become a bit tawdry with all of its
American influences, it is still a kind of charming world. As the Caterpillar
tractors remake the very nature of the outlying regions of the city, they also
churn up the ugliness of the former concrete and asphalt landscape, bringing,
if nothing else, new life to the region. This neo-capitalism may, as Godard
seems to be arguing, break up also the purity of former structures of French
life, but the habitants of these new spaces, like Juliette, seem happily
enchanted by their lives, the rhythm of which seems to be drop the kid off at
the daycare center, go shopping for a new dress, have a little sex on the side,
meet up with friends or even flirt with local coffee-shop customers, get
groceries, pick up the child, go home and cook your husband a good dinner.
If
Godard is clearly mocking mid-century French life, the people who suffer it
seem placid as sheep walking into the slaughter-house. And like a neighborly
gossip, the 2 or 3 things that the director whispers into our ears, ultimately
don’t add up to much. His goal, it appears, is simply to get us thinking about
a much longer list.
Los Angeles, June 20, 2018
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2018).
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