2 or 3 Things I Know About Her

Made in 1967, at the most fertile and restless point of Jean-Luc Godard's career, 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her is among the boldest of his sixties essays — shot, remarkably, at the same time as Made in U.S.A. The "her" of the title, Godard explained, is not the heroine at all but the Paris region itself, then being torn up and remade by motorways and high-rise housing estates.

Marina Vlady plays Juliette, a married woman who drifts into casual prostitution to pay for the goods of the new consumer society, and Godard uses her single day as a fragile armature for a meditation on capitalism, language, sexuality and perception. He interrupts the narrative with his own whispered philosophical commentary, with billboards and brand names, and with the famous extreme close-up of a cup of coffee in whose swirling surface a whole galaxy seems briefly to turn. The result is less a story than a thinking-aloud conducted in images and sound.

Demanding and discursive, the film has become a cornerstone of essayistic cinema and a key reference for scholars of Godard and of the modern city alike. It is not the place for a newcomer to begin with the director, but for those willing to meet it on its own terms it offers one of the cinema's richest, most searching reflections on how we live among objects, signs and the spaces we build for ourselves.