2 or 3 Things I Know About Her marked Godard’s first attempt at a non-narrative essay film.  Influenced by the French government’s new industrialization projects, the film mourns the loss of a country’s identity as it is vastly, and quickly, transformed into a capitalist wasteland filled with large, lifeless buildings, congested traffic, and an overwhelming supply of commodities.  From the opening shot, Godard’s whispering voice on the soundtrack is drowned out by the loud, obtrusive sounds of construction.  It is the first time Godard has been so directly audible, making clear that character and plot were no longer mandatory for an “auteur”.  His attempts to mold sound and image into a unique form of personal expression had begun.

The “Her” in the title refers to the city of Paris as well as to Marina Vlady, the lead actress, and her character Juliette.  In the opening scene, following the expository introduction, she discusses pop-culture and fashion with her husband, while apparently indifferent to the importance of his political opposition to the Vietnam War.  This short but comical scene, a sign of what’s to follow, is a scathing attack on bourgeois apathy about the “Americanization” of France.  The husband, a surrogate for Godard, argues that capitalism and the commodification of a culture intrinsically create a new value system in which the importance once conferred on ideas has been shifted to commodities [shiny cars, household goods, and the latest fashionable clothes] and day-to-day life is rendered meaningless as it progresses without meaningful questions.  The following shot shows Juliette in the distance washing dishes as she turns to the camera and remarks, “There’s nothing simpler than taking things for granted.”  Few moments in Godard’s previous films contain the chilling condemnatory tone of this sequence.

Although Godard’s approach in 2 or 3 Things distances the viewer, it is important to note that this film must be viewed differently than those which precede it.  Without character and plot, sound/image association is key to interpreting the ideas presented, whether tongue-in-cheek or sincere.  Dixon notes that “functional dialogue is intermingled with introspection, and images that tell us of the dailiness of Juliette’s life are intermingled with shots that convey the hidden and endless significance of a cigarette, a cup of coffee, an apartment building, a bulldozer, a gas station pump, a myriad of voices and images which are compressed into a mere 95 minutes of running time.”  The famous cosmos in a coffee cup sequence is the most remarkable scene in the film and a perfect example of Godard’s methodology.  As a café patron stirs cream in his coffee, the camera captures a close-up which reveals an image resembling the universe in motion.  The overlapping dialogue during this shot is a direct expression of Godard’s current state of mind regarding the world and the disappointment of his own cinema to achieve its lofty goals:

It is Godard’s belief that language cannot define an image, yet advertising and marketing capitalists attempt to do just that by manipulating language into profitable lies.  These images (used as advertising gimmicks and marketing ploys) are steeped in associations which are used to breed consumerism in every culture they touch.  It is his goal with 2 or 3 Things to put truth back into the image, by redefining these associated images into a montage of great political significance.  That is to say, he strips the images of all meaning and with his camera presents them truthfully within his own political rhetoric.  Unlike the capitalists who reshape language and images to serve their own needs, Godard attempts to find the truth and beauty within them.

This new style, truly a new frontier for Godard, freed him from prior limitations: his groundbreaking, politically charged films challenged the audiences preconceptions regarding what cinema was and could be.  Whether a success or a failure, 2 or 3 Things is a key film in the Godard canon because it provides a roadmap for the directions he’ll take afterwards.  While its lack of plot and character allowed him to explore the ideas he was interested in, the film is without the jovial, antic charm of Breathless or Band of Outsiders.  As an intellectual and cinematic work of art, it is nearly flawless, but its cold, impenetrable nature is repellent; the viewer misses the bracing humanity of Godard’s best films.  It is not necessarily a weakness of the film, but as some of his future films shows, his most accomplished late-period work successfully combines his rants about leftist politics and the nature of cinema, experimentation with image and sound editing, and an embracing humanity that helps to bridge the gap between the abstractness of his ideas and the audience to which he presents them.  Even without this final element, 2 or 3 Things is remarkable for its ingenuity and remains one of Godard's most important films.