Jean-Luc Godard always had an interest in the relationship between politics and the spaces it influences. The topographies of modernity happened to coincide with his sharp turn towards cinematic political questioning, in films such as Tout Va Bien (1972), La Chinoise (1967), and Week-end (1967), looking in particular at a factory, an inner-city flat/Maoist commune, and a busy roadway. These spaces provided more than a backdrop for Godard’s political arguments: they seemed to actually visually manifest them.

The best example of this relationship between space and politics is, however, in another film he made in 1967: Two or Three Things I Know About Her. The film, a kind of dark visual cousin to Jacques Tati’s Playtime (1967), was spawned from the magazine Nouval observateur which published an article, followed by a series of responsive letters (always a dangerous indulgence), regarding the subject of increasing casual prostitution practiced by middle-class women.

The rise in such phenomena was linked to various social changes – after all, this was only a year before the riots of May ‘68, the permissive society had been in full swing in west for several years, and the general social unrest in many nations so was, to put it in the usual clichéd way, a time of change.

But Godard ties the ideas down to two specific factors instead of simply the bubbling 1960s trademarked revolution:

1. The social pressure exerted upon society, especially woman, by materialism.
2. The effects that such power of materialism has on the living spaces of the urban and suburban areas around Paris specifically.

The two aspects are linked explicitly in the film, mixing Godard’s burgeoning essayistic style with a fictional dramatisation following suburban housewife Juliette Janson (Marina Vlady). After dropping off her child at a day-care centre, she is shown to embark on her usual day of casual prostitution.

Essentially, Godard is one of the first filmmakers to tie materialism and sexuality together, arguing that the sexual revolution would ultimately mean commodification rather than mere easy freedoms. The fact that he does so with a keen eye on the psychogeographical of Parisian development during the era, only shows his further skill in addressing multiple ideas, at least at that point in his career.

The film opens with a statement, connecting the concept of ‘Her’ (Elle) to the spatial area of ‘The Paris Region; (La région  parisienne), and this is the film’s chief gambit; the blurring of the female body with the living spaces of Paris. Both are on sale.

It is worth noting that the film was made in the same year that Guy Debord, the shambolic Situationist who connected commercialism with urban change well before Godard, published his most definitive work The Society of the Spectacle. It is surprising that, with the rest of the film’s numerous literary references, Godard failed to reference Debord as the two were on the exact same lines on this matter of place and commodification changing social mores.

This being said, Debord rejected Godard’s work on the grounds that its own (then waning) obsession with popular culture, undermined the general radical position, still speaking to the commercial masses; such is the po-faced seriousness of most hard-leaning political artists.

Hindsight shows Debord to be overly judgemental in the case of Godard’s 1960s output; he would soon be making just the kind of impenetrable political treatises that Debord saw as the future, and Godard would spend the next decade paying for it in creative purgatory as he went further down the cinematic cul-de-sac.

Their ambivalent relationship aside, Debord suggested the same effects of the changes in the living spaces within Post-War cities that Godard encounters in Two or Three. In The Society of the Spectacle Debord suggests why this is, writing that:

Urbanism is the mode of appropriation of the natural and human environment by capitalism, which, true to its logical development toward absolute domination, can (and now must) refashion the totality of space into its own peculiar decor.

The natural fallout of this is not only visual (the film basking in such developments of many typical high-rise blocks and motorways) but also social, and Two or Three looks to this fallout where the race towards consumerism (itself a circular journey that can never be completed) is only achievable for household women such as Juliette if they also sell their bodies; the social and physical body being ‘refashioned’ into the ‘peculiar décor’ of urbanism.

This relationship, however, must have a context and some greater enabler than simply the desire for the latest gadgets, fashions, and household goods which is basically how Godard frames it. To somewhat counter this simplistic aspect of the film, Godard does make the link between the very design of these spaces, built out of (and for) materialistic consumption, and the potential for the women to, in a sense, lose the moral mores of middle-class life through the very architecture of such places. It is a not dissimilar social escape explored by Luis Buñuel in Belle de Jour (1967) around the same time.

Many shots show Juliette outside one of the high-rise blocks, in one instance showing her suggesting that ‘A landscape is like a face’. This builds a link between the space of the living quarters and the space of her body; the link which pushes her to the conclusion of prostitution in the spare hours of her day.

The film has some bizarre moments because of this link, especially when considering the paranoia over the way women are forced to operate in these spaces. Godard throws suspicion of prostitution upon every woman in the film. Even when they do not for one moment suggest the possibility of selling of their bodies for sex, there is an underlying suspicion that any woman living comfortably in this area is doing so by means of prostitution. It is a misguided, misogynistic absurdity, no doubt in part explained by Godard’s recent messy divorce with actress Anna Karina.

The point, however, is that he is not extending such potential simply out of paranoia, but out of growing disgust at the system that is effectively forcing some women into such situations, at least in a generous reading. Godard puts the blame at the feet of the developer, the politician, and the prefect of management at the company Spatial Planning, Paul Delouvrier, who oversaw many of the real developments used in the film.

Going on the programme Zoom (1966), Godard went head-to-head on the subject with government official Jean Saint-Geours, the results of which were telling. In the debate, Godard links prostitution to outside factors, suggesting the Marxist view that any person working for solely commercial purposes (such as advertising) is working in a form of prostitution anyway and that both mental and physical forms of selling oneself are an outcome of the consumerist environment.

‘To me,’ he argued, ‘it’s not an individual phenomena but a collective one.’ We are all technically hookers of some form in Godard’s eyes which perhaps shows the unabashed ridiculousness of such Mai ’68-ish thinking.

Jacques Tati was far more effective in critiquing the modern developments of Paris in the same year with the phenomenal Playtime. The buildings of that film, the famed ‘Tativille’ set, mocked Post-War architecture with absolute precision. They also did not simplistically turn their female occupants into sex-workers, and Tati did not require a lecturing Marxist treatise on political autonomy to sell Playtime as a work of art either.

In Godard’s defence, Saint-Geours fared no better on Zoom either, describing the difference between casual and committed prostitution with all the subtly of a pimp. ‘One is a case of over-adaptation to our consumer society,’ he argued, ‘the occasional prostitute who quickly realises that a comfortable life requires money… The other is a typical case of a maladjusted woman gradually destroying herself.’ This crass overview is typical of the period in its blanket assertions. He does, however, make a correct assertion aligning with Godard that ‘nothing encourages these phenomena more than large cities’. On that point, he and Godard were in agreement.

The final scene of the film, a moment in which consumer product packaging fills the screen, is an unusually poignant moment. The shot shows a strange alignment of various product boxes on the grass outside of an apartment block, rather like a model plan for the development. If attention has been paid to Godard’s images of the buildings throughout the film, the likeness between these boxes and their adjacent housing development will be obvious.

Godard is making one final stark statement: that, like those small boxes which hold the product, the buildings hold their own contents for sale – the occupants, the people – in the same commodified way. Their ability to sustain themselves in the area is circular in its cause and means: to live in these boxes is to be turned into a product, a product which must be sold if you desire to live in the boxes.