General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Two or Three Things I Know About Her

Two or Three Things I Know About Her (Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle) is a 1967 French film written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard, following a single day in the life of Juliette Janson, a Parisian housewife played by Marina Vlady who works occasionally as a prostitute to maintain her family's standard of living.¹^•² The "her" of the title refers not only to Juliette but to Paris itself, specifically the administrative region of the capital as redefined by a mid-1960s shake-up of local government, a word that happens to be feminine in French.³^•⁴

Key fact	Detail
Original title	Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle, France, 1967¹
Director and star	Jean-Luc Godard, who also supplies the whispered narration; Marina Vlady as Juliette Janson⁵
Premise	A housewife in a high-rise on the Paris outskirts supplements her husband's income with occasional prostitution²
Production	Shot in August–September 1966, in the mornings, while Made in U.S.A. was shot in the afternoons⁵^•⁶
Source	Catherine Vimenet's investigation in Le Nouvel Observateur into occasional prostitution arising with the new housing estates of the Paris region⁷
Key crew	Cinematography by Raoul Coutard; producer Anatole Dauman; original music credited to Ludwig van Beethoven⁷
US release and reception	Opened March 17, 1967; runtime 1h 25m; 94% on the Tomatometer from 33 reviews⁸

Spoilers

Story and subject

The film covers one day, dated August 17, 1966, in the life of Juliette Janson, who lives with her husband Robert (Roger Montsoret) and their children in a modern apartment in a large housing development on the outskirts of Paris. She leaves her daughter with a babysitter, shops for clothes, waits in a cafe for a client, and visits a hotel room with a customer; later she joins her friend Marianne (Anny Duperey) for a paid encounter with an American journalist at a luxury hotel, before collecting her husband and returning home.² The film does not present her situation as hardship: her earnings pay for trivial middle-class luxuries, and sex is never shown, only conversations with clients or prostitutes parading with Pan Am and TWA airline bags over their heads.⁹

The city as protagonist. Godard's Paris is defined by unchecked materialism, its suburbs filling with new apartment blocks built to sell the consumer dream, and the film equates consumerism with prostitution.¹ Repeated shots of building sites present the film itself as a work in progress, and the voice-over links Juliette's circumstances to Gaullist modernization and its claimed destruction of French "moral fiber."³^•⁴ The Vietnam War runs through the film as well, in intercut images of napalmed victims and bursts of American gunfire that interrupt the soundtrack.¹⁰^•¹¹

Style and technique

Godard abandons naturalistic storytelling. There is no driving plot, no suspense, and no conventional conflict; instead a whispered voice-over, spoken by Godard himself, moves between Juliette's situation and disquisitions on language, image, advertising, and politics.⁹^•¹ The soundtrack is deliberately unstable, cutting at times to silence and then amplifying background noise such as traffic or a pinball machine to deafening levels.¹¹

Acting against naturalism. Vlady often mouths lines that are clearly not her own: Godard reportedly asked her questions and fed her lines through a small speaker hidden in her hair, part of what the film scholar Adrian Martin describes as a highly unusual, multileveled acting job.⁶ At moments the actress turns to the camera and addresses the viewer as Vlady, commenting on the character she plays, an example of the Brechtian distancing (technique keeping viewers detached rather than absorbed in the story) the film uses throughout.¹⁰

The film's most cited image is a close-up of the surface of a coffee cup, in which the swirling foam becomes a cosmos in miniature; Marguerite Duras called this shot one of the summits of Godard's work.¹² Advertising is a recurring target: the ads in the film are American or American-inspired, and Godard wrote in 1966 that "in the modern world, the advertising element reigns supreme, determining everything, paralyzing everything."⁵

Production

The producer Anatole Dauman had sought since 1964 to make a film with Godard on the subject of occasional prostitution, a project that also yielded Masculin féminin in the same collaboration.⁷ Godard based the film largely on Catherine Vimenet's report in Le Nouvel Observateur on occasional prostitution that had grown up with the new housing estates of the Paris region.⁷ He later told Roger Ebert's paper that the project began as a sort of remake of The Big Sleep (1946) with Vlady in the Humphrey Bogart role, the detective transformed into a prostitute, and that he shot it in the mornings while directing Made in U.S.A. in the afternoons, calling the double production "a sort of bet. A performance."⁵

Reported running times differ by source: the Cinémathèque française and BFI list 90 minutes, Neil Young's Film Lounge 95 minutes, and Roger Ebert's review 100 minutes.⁷^•³^•⁵ Rotten Tomatoes lists 1h 25m.⁸

Place in Godard's career

The film marks the beginning of Godard's move away from the genre parodies and New Wave entertainment of his early career toward the fractured, essayistic, and politically engaged cinema of La Chinoise and Weekend (both 1967) and the later Dziga Vertov period.¹³^•¹⁴ Compared with the assured narrative games of Alphaville and Pierrot le fou (both 1965), critics note an uncharacteristic self-doubt in its tone, a lack of surety that distinguishes it within his 1960s work.⁶ It returns to the prostitution theme of his earlier Vivre sa vie (1962), again following a middle-class prostitute, though the style had become considerably more experimental in the intervening years.¹

Reception. Rotten Tomatoes records a 94% Tomatometer from 33 reviews and a 72% audience score, with a critics' consensus describing the film as a turning point in Godard's filmography that rewards repeated viewings.⁸ Peter Bradshaw, reviewing the 2001 British reissue, called it "unashamedly intellectual, discursive, noodling film-making, a cinema of ideas, conceived in a language that is demanding, but not totally opaque."¹¹ The Criterion Collection released the film on DVD with a commentary by film scholar Adrian Martin, archival interviews with Vlady and Godard, and a booklet essay by critic Amy Taubin; a 2006 theatrical rerelease in the United States was handled by Rialto Pictures, grossing $101.9K.¹⁵^•⁸

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 1960s › Released 1966 to 1969

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

Notice something wrong?