2 or 3 Things I Know About Her

To be honest, as soon as Luc-Godard's 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her started, I was afraid I was in for a very long screening. But that feeling of weariness evaporated for me as soon as Juliette was introduced. I think Juliette, through her alienation, made this film one of the most tragic that we have watched this entire year. As other people have mentioned, I saw Juliette as a metaphor for the city of Paris itself. She is beautiful, but bored with her beauty, using it only in a detached, calculating manner-- to make a living through prostitution. It seems to me that Luc-Godard believed that Paris was becoming tragic by whoring itself to the modern world through development and thereby betraying its spirit with chilling disinterest. I think that all of the women in this film represent different aspects of Paris in the face of heightening modernization. Many of them seem oppressed, sometimes in subtle, sometimes in obvious ways; for example, when Juliette's husband casually grabs the book away from her when she says she does not agree with what it says and, instead of encouraging her to think, tells her to read something else. Juliette promptly picks up a fashion magazine (which could once again serve as a metaphor for Paris itself).

I also agree that at times it seemed like Juliette was spewing pseudo-philosophy that really had little relevance, but I think this may be because the format (of speaking philosophic inner dialogue to the camera) introduced in this film has been so frequently imitated, therefore leaving me kind of jaded to something that was really quite effective.