Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle (1967) - film review

Paris in the 1960s.  Bored housewives living in dull housing estates resort to prostitution.  Meanwhile, the society around them drifts into a state of comatose acceptance of an emotionless, commercialised future.

Jean-Luc Godard’s brilliantly perceptive and eloquent study of social decline in the 1960s remains surprisingly fresh and relevant to today’s generation.  The film comes from a period where 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.

© James Travers 2000

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