2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle (1967)

“An essay of incomparable richness, which captures both Godard’s internal state in the summer of 1966 and the external world of Paris during that same endless month of light and shadow.” Wheeler Winston Dixon, The Films of Jean-Luc Godard, 1997 The ‘elle’ in question in the title is Paris itself, but Jean-Luc Godard had come a long way from the chic vision of the French capital featured in his debut, A bout de souffle (1960). Here the city is defined by unchecked materialism, its suburbs bursting forth with new apartment blocks to sell the consumer dream. Like his earlier Vivre sa vie (1962), 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her follows the comings and goings of a middle-class prostitute (now played by Marina Vlady), though Godard’s style had since become increasingly fractured and experimental. With no plot to speak of, Godard’s whispered voice-over leads us through various disquisitions into capitalism and its discontents – most memorably during a sequence in which the very cosmos seems to swirl in a coffee cup. For a very different portrayal of a bourgeois Parisian woman turning to prostitution, see Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour (1967).