Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle (1967)
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard

Film Review

Together with Week End (1967), Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle represents a brutally perceptive and eloquent commentary of social decline in the 1960s, one that remains surprisingly fresh and relevant four decades on.  The film comes from a period when the French New Wave's most radical filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard was beginning to depart from the conventional narrative form to a more abstract, free-flowing form of cinema.  Whilst this makes the film less accessible than his earlier works, this does not distract from the point he is making (unlike some of his later films where style appears to take precedence over content).  This film in particular uses some stunningly effective imagery, such as close-ups of a cup of coffee to represent the empty void into which human consciousness seems to be drifting.

The mid-1960s was a period that was ripe for this kind of intellectual criticism and deconstruction.  The West was becoming almost inured to the atrocities of the Vietnam war, rampant consumerism was having a marked effect on lifestyles and social attitudes, there was a growing rift between the left and right in France and a stirring social conscience.  There was never a better period to be a French film-maker, and Godard managed to reflect all these aspects of contemporary life in his films of this era.

Film Synopsis

Paris is a city that is in a state of constant evolution, and so are the people who live there.  It has many visages, many guilty secrets, many illusions - and so have the people who live there.  There is modernity amidst the desolation, construction alongside the decay and neglect.  Juliette Jeanson lives in the suburbs, married to Robert with a son, Christophe.  In their spare time, Robert and his friend Roger amuse themselves with their ham radio set-up.  Robert is unaware that when she is free to herself Juliette indulges in a spot of prostitution with her friend Marianne.  Most of their customers are Americans with a taste for French women.  Prostitution is commonplace in Paris, and is as common in hotels as it is in cheap flats that double as brothels.  Paris is an eternal mystery, an enigma that fails to be resolved, and so are the people who live there...