Review

by Andy Lauer for indieWIRE, July 22, 2009

A scene from Jean-Luc Godard's "2 or 3 Things I Know About Her," now available on the Criterion Collection.Jean-Luc Godard fans have cause to rejoice as the Criterion Collection has just issued releases of “Made in U.S.A.” and “2 or 3 Things I Know About Her,” both previously out of print and difficult to track down in the US.

“The greatest film by the greatest post-1950s filmmaker, Jean-Luc Godard’s ‘2 or 3 Things I Know About Her’ presents the critic, humbled by the beauty of its surfaces, the density of its ideas, and the uncanny coherence of its fragmented structure, with a writing dilemma,” writes critic Amy Taubin in a piece on the film for Criterion. “Better to describe ‘2 or 3 Things’ as a machine that morphs the colliding meanings of words and objects with dazzling speed, and generates an astonishing array of metaphors, paradoxes, digressions, and, above all, dialectical relationships, between idea and action, word and image, sound and picture, interior and exterior, microcosm and macrocosm. The swirling surface of a cup of coffee is transformed into the primordial ooze and also the infinite universe; two women in a café look at a magazine from different angles, but the collaged and cartooned female faces and bodies on its pages are degrading from any perspective.”