2 or 3 Things I Know About Her

As the Vietnam War escalated through the 1960s, French director Jean-Luc Godard moved further and further away from a cinema of watchability and toward an insufferable, smug-revolutionary film aesthetic. The 1967 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, like Week-End and Pierrot le Fou, straddles the border between his vital early work and his difficult later stuff; unlike those films, it’s not even any fun. An essay on the fuzziness of identity and meaning in an industrialized, consumerist society, 2 or 3 Things presents a series of tenuously connected scenes that blur the line between documentary and script, interview and dialogue, performance and being, cinema and life, and all the rest. It has moments of brilliance, but there are also long stretches where Godard sets the film on “auto-pedant.”