TWO OR THREE THINGS I KNOW ABOUT HER (76)

Directed by: Jean-Luc Godard (1967)

Starring: Marina Vlady, Anny Duperey

The Pitch: A housewife works part-time as a prostitute. Jean-Luc Godard works full-time as a jester-philosopher.

Theo Sez: Both Godard's most personal and most cerebral film (that I've seen), full of playful dialectics but also perhaps the closest he ever came to a Statement of Purpose, setting out his goal as an artist, "to catch a fleeting reason to be alive" - though of course it's impossible to know if that's really his goal, or if the movie's invisible narrator is supposed to be Godard (just as the "her" in the title could refer to at least three different things - that's part of the fun). It's a companion-piece to MASCULIN FEMININ, mixing personal with political, agitprop with character observation - and, as in that film, the human side invariably wins out. Its freewheeling exploration of the world is exhilarating, constantly audacious and inventive : a pair of cafe radicals sit surrounded by piles of books, taking turns to read out a random line from each ; a salesgirl we never saw before interrupts her work to tell the camera her evening schedule ("I'm meeting Jean-Claude at eight. Dinner, then a movie") ; a casual conversation turns into an extended discussion of language ("the house in which Man lives"). The political side - its Vietnam-era call to arms - is fascinating but less successful, too shrill and one-sided : when even a small boy's dream turns out to involve the unification of North and South Vietnam, you may wonder whether the film is any less of a "jumbo-sized brainwash" than the "Pax Americana" it so derides.