2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967)

 

2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle is one of Jean-Luc Godard’s unquenchable glories, a film of electrically vivid presences, suffused with a sense of absence and longing. Filmed in 1966, it finds the world bewildering, all but submerged in consumerism and its attendant messages and forced choices; between the surfeit of surrounding signs and meanings and a hellish global outlook (most prominently represented by Vietnam, frequently referenced here), it’s barely possible just to live in and experience the world, as one compulsively questions the most basic elements of identity, language and experience. And yet, compared to our own mostly drab world of blacks and greys, the environment is gloriously colourful and stimulating; even a mundane shot of a gas station ravishes the eye with the perfection of the composition, the reinforcing blocks and splashes of red linking the flowers in the foreground to a car standing at a pump to the trims on the fixtures. Similarly, as Godard’s voice over muses over the acceleration of science and progress, commenting how the future may now be more present than the present, the vivid observance of something as mundane as coffee swirling in a cup tells us otherwise, that the present for all its travails remains inexhaustibly fascinating and seductive. The film’s most identifiable plotline has its housewife protagonist (Marina Vlady) working as a prostitute, another expression of economic pressure, but on this occasion played mostly for absurdity, including an episode in which an American war correspondent (for the Arkansas Daily!), taking a Parisian break from Vietnam, has Vlady’s character and a colleague parade around with airline bags over their heads, the image both gleefully absurd and yet rather poignantly sad (not least because both the airlines in question, Pan Am and TWA, are now long gone, like much else of the film’s vivid consumerist reference points).