Two or three things I know about her | The fourth wall is constantly breaking | Godard
Read here the Spanish version of this article.
Watch the movie here if you are a Mubi subscriber. For some reason, this movie can’t be gifted, but it is on YouTube.
The cause of my tears can’t be found in the traces they leave on my cheeks.
A 10-year-old child grows up in a very particular family environment. In his house, everyone screams at each other constantly, even at him. Once, an aunt enters his room and whispers to him, asking for a favor. The child triggers and feels like killing everybody. He screams, shudders, and flees the room.
That’s the first time he’ll feel that a sociopath lives within him. Besides, he senses that feeling lies probably within everyone once in a while. His mother sees him visibly altered and reprimands him back. “Why are you acting like that?”, she asks. He confesses that he felt annoyed when his aunt whispered to him. “Bad if we scream at you, bad if we speak softly”, the mother replies.
The triggered child was me. What does it have to do with anything? Watching Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle was pretty hard, considering the off-voice narrator always whispering. Despite this, I really loved the movie, or at least its images. Because sometimes movies aren’t about the story but the visual feast.
Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle (Two or three things I know about her), by Jean Luc Godard, is about Juliette, a housewife dragged by monotony who flees Paris once a week to be a prostitute. But it’s more than that. It is a visual essay that accurately reflects love, sadness, cities, language, etc. Although it sometimes goes beyond, falling into the easy place of the We live in a society critiques that I sincerely hate.
“I heard a voice say to me: you are indestructible (…) We often try to analyze the meaning of words, but we’re too easily amazed. Frankly, nothing is easier than to take one thing or another for granted”, tells us Juliette, in the kitchen.
She’s literally speaking to us, and we know it because it is the second time she breaks the fourth wall during the movie. That’s what amazed me the most. A bunch of women and a couple of men speaking to us in certain moments directly: a sixties version of Fleabag or The Office, but a smart-ass one.
As Roger Ebert (RIP) signaled in his review about “Two or Three Things”, it is a visual essay in a way that reflects “the typical Godard obsession with slogans, ads, signs and just plain words. Sometimes the words are meaningless; they’re in the movie to remind us that we live in an environment of words without usually paying much attention to them”.
One would even think that monologues of the characters are mere excuses for us to know the cosmovision of Godard. It is improbable how certain characters express themselves in particular situations. For example, one of her sons asks Juliette: “What is the language?”. She replies: “a language is where a man lives”. Minutes later, we encounter Juliette in a clothing store, blabbering something about the word ensemble, thinking out loud:
“‘Ensemble’ is a word I like. An ensemble (housing project) is thousands of people, maybe even a city. Nobody knows what the city of tomorrow will be like. Some of its past semantic richness will be lost, undoubtedly, undoubted. The city’s creative and formative role will be taken over by other systems of communication, maybe. TV, radio. Vocabulary and semantic”.
A coffee meditation about the essence of objects
There’s something worthy about the film: despite being cocky and pretentious, the annoying narrator gets to the point with some sublime reflections on life. This time, a scene in a cafeteria deepens the true essence of objects, relations, words, and feelings in general:
“Maybe an object is what serves as a link between subjects, allowing us to live in a society, to be together. But since social relations are always ambiguous, since my thoughts divide as much as unite, and my words unite by what they express and isolate by what they omit, since a wide gulf separates my subjective certainty of myself from the objective truth others have of me, since I constantly end up guilty, even though I feel innocent, since every event changes my daily life, since I always fail to communicate, to understand, to love and be loved, and every failure deepens my solitude, since… Since… since I cannot escape the objectivity crushing me nor the objectivity expelling me, since I cannot rise to a state of being nor collapse into nothingness… I have to listen more than ever I have to look around me at the world, my fellow creature, my brother”.
Back to Juliette, she also meditates about sadness and the meaning of the words upon feelings whilst buying clothes. Again, how she expresses herself doesn’t feel natural, which reassures that it is a sort of mockumentary or a video essay with powerful images and signs overlapping concepts and monologues. Still, her thought is pretty valuable:
“My impressions don’t always relate to the object. For instance, desire. Sometimes we know the object of desire. Sometimes, we don’t. Say I feel I’m missing something. I don’t know what I feel afraid of, even if there’s nothing there that frightens me. What expression does not refer to a specific object? Oh, yes. Order, logic. Yes. For instance, something can make me cry. But the cause of my tears can’t be found in the traces they leave on my cheeks. You can describe what happens when I do something without necessarily indicating what makes me do what I do”.
As the movie transcurs, we observe the execution of several infrastructures works all around Paris, a kind of Bogotá chaotic actual version but almost 50 years before. Constant reflections on the building of the cities indicate that cities are constructions in space, provide a particular pleasure, the connections between the places and their inhabitants, and the paradox of the relation between us and the modern society, as the annoying voice implies: “living in a modern society is living in a big comic. Signs make me distrust the language”, the boldest narrator concludes.
I liked the movie. It’s a 3.6 out of 5. I don’t know what’s happening whenever I get to this point. I doubt to recommend it. I’ll be more straightforward this time: if you like intellectual movies, the French New Wave, and the french cinema, it’s for you. And believe me, it must be for you, because I don’t like any of those things. The movie is pure joy. The aesthetics are a visual feast.
You can read the other reviews here.
