The title of Godard’s
Numero Deux contains numerous
allusions: to the film itself as a potential new beginning (a sort of “remake”
of
Breathless); to the second-person “you” with whom “I” may spend a
fraught lifetime trying to forge a workable connection; to the scatological context
in which a child may be asked whether he or she has to do number one or number
two. It’s not meant as a cheap shot to say that the latter meaning often most
conditions the experience of watching the film – it references the concept
several times, for example in musing on giving birth as a form of defecation,
and lamenting about constipation, and as watching experiences go, it pushes
heavily toward alienation and disgust. The distancing is multi-faceted – for
much of the time the film strenuously refuses cinematic capacity, filling more
than 50% of the frame with blackness, the rest with one or two TV screens
within the frame - the sense is of cinema in retreat, the concept of the “dream
factory” having let the dreams get away, leaving mostly joyless process and
output (Godard appears onscreen in an opening sequence, largely addressed to the
process of raising financing). The desolation consumes all human interactions –
the main recognizable “action” on the screens within the screen consists of
scenes from a three-generation family: a mother and father consumed with loathing
and sexual dysfunction, a condition that will certainly affect the young boy
and girl (the concept of the primal scene is evoked several times);
grandparents lost in analysis or reminiscence. If this had been Godard’s last
film, his equivalent to Pasolini’s
Salo of the same year, it would make
much sense as such – it even ends on a heavily emphatic note of machinery being
shut down – but as we know that was far from the case, it seems now like an act
of purging, even of expiation.
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