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, and he shot it, 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 frame 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. Story is kept to a minimum; what remains is a kind of thinking aloud 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. Newcomers to the director should start elsewhere. Those willing to meet it on its own terms will find one of the most searching films ever made about how we live among objects and signs, and in the spaces we build for ourselves.