by ·Comments Off on Force Majeure (2014, Ruben Östlund)

Sometimes I get behind on the ol’ movie blog because I watch a movie I’d been expecting to like and it turns out I have nothing to say about it and can’t even bring myself to write a plot description. Fortunately there’s Cinema Scope to tell me what to think.

Inspired by a bunch of viral videos! Yes, exclamation mark. I’m still confused by the bus-ride finale, but at least now I know it’s part of the director’s weird urge to incorporate his favorite youtube videos into the script. Full of gentle doom music, plus some Vivaldi. Won a million awards, including a prize at Cannes – where Mark Peranson wrote:

The film benefits immensely from Ostlund viewing this familial tragedy through a wry microscopic lens, which helps counteract his Haneke-like tendencies: when Tomas bursts out crying after faking tears mere seconds earlier, and then can’t stop, the situation is at the same time funny-sad and funny ha-ha. There’s a glimmer of warmth to be found in the winter chills, and Ostlund’s accomplishment is rare: Force Majeure is an example of universal distance. Here, man is the animal.

It’s actually Oostlund, or Oestlund, or O-with-two-dots-stlund, but my Macbook has decided to disable the useful feature where I used to hold down a vowel key and it would ask me how I’d like to decorate it with accent marks and such.

So this is the movie where the dad abandons his family during an apparent avalanche, and this leads to strife. It’s got the same problem as most movies (and possibly most relationships): that of communication. They can’t move past this moment because the dad refuses to talk about it, even though the mom doesn’t want to talk about anything else. They drag other couples into their vacation-crisis, sparking little sub-crises everywhere.

The family with Fanny and Mats:

Whiteout rescue – possibly staged for the kids’ benefit:

A. Muredda:

Ultimately, Force Majeure isn’t about “the crisis of masculinity” so much as the way personal edges never quite get shaved off with the adoption of archetypal roles: not just father and husband, but also mother and girlfriend. In a film rife with smart visual set pieces, from Tomas’ flight from the table to a later family excursion into whiteout conditions that allows him to reassert his dominance, the richest belongs to Ebba. Late in a day off from her family, mostly spent sitting at the hotel bar and having a private ski, Ebba relieves herself in the bushes off to the side of the hill, the camera slowly pushing in on her face as she hears what sounds like her little tribe slowly coming down the slope before her; she tearfully looks in their direction but doesn’t announce herself, troubled by her momentary separateness but not about to change it. Tomas’ actions during what ought to have been a redemptive defining moment are the ones that will surely inspire the most post-screening discussions, as they do with the couples Ebba solicits, but what sets Force Majeure apart is this heightened sensitivity to how even an event as minor as Ebba’s little breather is incongruous with the stories that families tell about who they are.

by ·Comments Off on Far From Vietnam (1967)

Piecemeal protest doc with surprisingly great location footage and interesting scenes, each one a bit too loud and going on for too long. The pieces are mostly unsigned, but I believe Chris Marker put the project together, and some segments are either identified online, or just very easily guessed (ahem, Resnais). They mention that Joris Ivens shot on location – most everyone else stayed home and used stock footage or filmed protest marches.

“It is in Vietnam that the main question of our time arises: the right of the poor to establish societies based on something else than the interests of the rich.”

Cluster-bomb:

Supposed to be President Johnson:

The Resnais segment is interesting before it wears out its welcome. Bernard Fresson (of a few Resnais films, including a small part in Je t’aime, je t’aime) is playing “writer Claude Ridder” (name of the lead character in Je t’aime, je t’aime played by Claude Rich) while a woman Karen Blanguernon (Rene Clement’s The Deadly Trap) glares from the corner of his office. This segment was written by Jacques Sternberg (Je t’aime, je t’aime, of course), so perhaps Claude Ridder was his standard lead character name, since this Ridder seems too impassioned to be the heartbroken dead soul from the feature. “Ridder” monologues on the war, politics, and his own inability to make change. “A spineless French intellectual articulating excuses for his class’s political apathy,” per the NY Times.

Next, a history lesson using stock footage, photographs and comics, drawing connections to the Spanish Civil War (the Resnais had mentioned Algeria).

Then Godard, who monologues in front of a giant film camera, talking about the distance, his inability to connect with the war itself, or even the French working class, the focus of so many of his films. Since he can’t film on-location, he inserts Vietnam into his feature films. “I make films. That’s the best I can do for Vietnam. Instead of invading Vietnam with a kind of generosity that makes things unnatural, we let Vietnam invade us.”

After a jaunty music video to a protest song by Tom Paxton, a longer somber voiceover reading the words of Michele Ray who spent three weeks with the Viet Cong, showing her footage before it goes crazy at the end.

“Why We Fight,” in which General Westmoreland explains the official U.S. position on the war, filmed off a TV while someone zooms around and twiddles knobs. Title must be referencing the 1940’s U.S. propaganda film series Why We Fight, which Joris Ivens contributed to.

Anti-napalm rabbi:

Monologue by Fidel Castro, who gives his theories on guerrilla warfare and how this applies to Vietnam. The new wavers seemed to have easy access to Fidel back then.

Ann Uyen, a Vietnamese woman living in Paris discusses Norman Morrison’s setting himself on fire outside the pentagon, and what that meant to her people. “We think that in America there is another war, a people’s war against everything that’s unfair.” Then an interview with Norman’s widow, who seems in sync with Norman’s politics. This was by William Klein.

War protest zombie walk, probably shot by Klein:

Marker’s outro:

In facing this defiance [of the Vietnamese], the choice of rich society is easy: either this society must destroy everything resisting it – but the task may be bigger than its means of destruction – or it will have to transform itself completely – but maybe it’s too much for a society at the peak of its power. If it refuses that option, it will have to sacrifice its reassuring illusions, to accept this war between the poor and the rich as inevitable, and to lose it.

by ·Comments Off on What Time Is It There? (2001, Tsai Ming-Liang)

I haven’t watched a narrative (non-Walker) Tsai movie in a while, and I forget that they don’t exactly have stories that make any proper sense. For some reason I was in the mood to watch walker Lee Kang-sheng do nothing much in front of a static camera for many hours, so I double-featured this with Stray Dogs.

Lee is a hapless sidewalk watch salesman who has just lost his father (the father shows up in a prologue before we know who he is). Lee lives with his mom (Yi-Ching Lu) who is taking the father’s death hard. He sells a watch (his own) to Chen Shiang-chyi on her way to Paris, then the movie starts following the two of them separately.

Lee watches a film (Dragon Inn?) with uninvited friend:

Lee watches Leaud:

Chen meets Leaud:

She doesn’t have much story to speak of, hangs around Paris looking lonely, bumps into Jean-Pierre Leaud and gets his phone number in a creepy-hilarious scene, gets sick in a restaurant and goes home with a woman (Cecilia Yip).

Meanwhile in Taiwan (New Taipei City, I think, before it was called that), Lee watches The 400 Blows and becomes obsessed with changing every clock he sees to Paris time, and his mom thinks the changed clocks are signs from her dead husband, starts taping up the windows to conform to “his time”. It doesn’t seem to end well. His case of watches gets stolen, and in Paris, Chen’s suitcase gets stolen and thrown in the lake… then fished out by Lee’s dead father.

This played Cannes the year of Millennium Mambo, Va Savoir, I’m Going Home, Mulholland Dr., In Praise of Love, Kandahar and The Piano Teacher – a year of puzzling films by great directors.

–
The Skywalk Is Gone (2002)

A crazy scene in a movie theater and its restroom in What Time Is It There prefigures Goodbye Dragon Inn. This short, made as an epilogue to What Time Is It There, sets up The Wayward Cloud.

Chen has returned to Taiwan, is looking for Lee but she’s confused that the skywalk is gone, replaced by an underpass, where they pass while Lee’s on his way to a porn audition.

Ed Gonzalez calls Lee and his mom “victims of the mundane and the repetitive”.
“It all comes back to the issue of time, which Tsai views as an immutable burden that people nonetheless seek to control.”

Chen with a walkin’ monk:

Chen just missing Lee:

Tsai:

I enjoy putting characters in environments where it seems like they have no relationships with others because I want to think about what kind of distance we should keep between each other. I also like to put people in situations where they do not have love, because I want to know how much love we need, and what kind of relationships we want.

According to Senses of Cinema, Lee and his movie-parents appeared in those same roles in Rebels of the Neon God and The River.

by ·Comments Off on Cinétracts and other Chris Marker shorts

Cinétracts (1968)

I watched a collection containing roughly half of the Cinetracts, an anonymously-directed series of two-to-five-minute shorts. The first few seemed to be protest-photo montages, and I thought watching a bunch of these in a row would be tiresome so I spaced it out over a few weeks. Some are very different though, telling stories/poems with intertitles or scrawling words directly onto the photos, using different forms of movement and speeds of editing. Some use zooms and dissolves, bringing the photos to life, others are simply long takes of photos interspersed with titles, wordplay, pages from books.

Contributors supposedly included Godard, Marker, Resnais, Gorin, Philippe Garrel (same year he made Le Révélateur), Jackie Raynal (editor on half the Six Moral Tales), Jean-Denis Bonan (Jean Rollin’s editor at the time), Gerard Fromanger and Jacques Loiseleux (later cinematographer for Ivens, Pialat and Yves Boisset). Marker was busy – this project overlapped his SLON collective and Groupe Medvedkine.

Gary Elshaw has by far the most useful work on the Cinetracts online, even if it’s only about Godard’s contributions.

The purpose of the Ciné-Tracts, as with most of Godard’s 1968 film projects, was to offer a critically alternative source of ‘news’ or information in contrast to the commercially offered mediums available. … The state censorship of the media throughout the events of May necessitated communication along different lines than had existed before.

Other online writing on these tends to focus on determining which ones Godard made (and they can’t seem to agree).

–
Casque Bleu (1995)

Info dump by a cynical Frenchman who acted as a UN peacekeeper during one of the Yugoslav wars. He speaks rapidly in close-up, with occasional title cards for different topics and cutaways to a photo album.

“When you’re in a country at war, armed, and you have orders not to use weapons, in actual fact you are on the side of the aggressor, the one who’s trying to conquer the land.”

–
Description of a Struggle (1960)

Watched this again with much improved picture quality and English voiceover. Had been burning to see it again since watching Dan Geva’s Description of a Memory. Still great, but I think I prefer Sunday in Peking. Noticed this time when the voiceover said “bar kokhba,” which is apparently not only the name of a John Zorn music project.

by ·Comments Off on White (1994, Krzysztof Kieslowski)

Still my least favorite of the trilogy, though it’s less mean-spirited than I remember it (final image of Julie Delpy seeking reconciliation after her ex has her falsely imprisoned is mostly what I’ve remembered). Delpy’s in the movie for about five minutes – it’s mostly about her ex-husband Karol trying to get back on his feet after their divorce. She (maliciously) leaves him homeless and unemployed, but he befriends a fellow Pole while begging in the Paris metro, gets back to Poland, earns a fortune in a realty scheme, starts a shady import business, then frames Delpy for his own faked murder. The plot description sounds worse than the film itself, and the character described in paragraph form sounds like a total dick, while Karol seems more cuddly in person.

Karol is Zbigniew Zamachowski, who starred with his hairdresser brother Jerzy Stuhr in the final Decalogue segment, in which they also played brothers. Karol’s Gabriel Byrne-looking Polish friend is Janusz Gajos, a lead in the fourth Decalogue. This won best director in Berlin (vs. Philadelphia and Smoking/No Smoking)

K.K.: “The subject of the film is humiliation – men are not, and do not want to be, equal. The film is also about equality.” His cowriter Piesiewicz: “I knew very well that people in fact didn’t want to be free. All consumerism and advertising is based on us not being equal. Equality of opportunity, yes. But what does that mean? What’s needed most is empathy…”

Also watched the great Talking Heads short again, and…

Seven Women of Different Ages (1979, Kieslowski)

Dancers at different stages. First: young girls being pulled into position by a patient teacher, then older girls being screamed at by an abusive teacher. Rehearsal, then on stage, then a terrified-looking woman doing a routine. An understudy, watching closely but not actually practicing the moves. Finally an instructor of young girls the age of the first segment – I wondered if it’s the actual teacher from that segment, but it’s not. Fits in well with Talking Heads, obviously.

by ·Comments Off on Mouchette (1967, Robert Bresson)

Mouchette has a crappy home life and actively hates everyone at school, throwing clumps of mud at them every day after classes. Her dad shoves her around, prevents her from having any fun, and her mom is dying, leaving Mouchette to take care of the baby. Meanwhile trapper Arsene and groundskeeper Mathieu have a Rules of the Game rivalry going on, also a romantic rivalry for the local barkeep. Mouchette sulks silently, preoccupied with sex and death, is raped by Arsene during a rainstorm, has a series of unsympathetic encounters with the townspeople after her mother dies, then drowns herself.

Bresson: “It can’t be summarized. If it could, it’d be awful.”

Pay close attention to the words of a song sung at Mouchette’s school and you can detect references to the overall theme of the film:

Opens pre-credits on Mouchette’s mom crying alone, before we know who she is, “What will become of them without me?” Tony Rayns in the commentary says the movie is about the disappearance of a person from human society. Sound effects from footsteps and futzing about with props are prominent, like in Rivette movies, although sometimes looped audio (and even visuals in the final shot) is noticeable. Camera focuses on hands and bodies, moving away from downturned faces. It’s a short movie, setting up all the players and conflicts efficiently in its first ten minutes with spare dialogue. Adapted from the same novelist as Diary of a Country Priest.

Godard made the trailer, in which a voiceover says it’s “about the rape of a young girl – in short, a film that is christian and sadistic.”

Repetition:

RB: “Adolescents are more flexible than adults. They’re interesting because of their mystery, their inner force. What I find interesting is thrusting a child, a young girl, into a situation that’s terribly mean, even nasty, and seeing how she reacts.”

R. Polito:

Shooting on Mouchette started soon after Bresson finished Au hasard Balthazar, and Mouchette seems a combination of the suffering Marie and the donkey, Balthazar, much as the hunting (rabbits) and poaching (partridges) episodes once again analogue human and animal misfortunes.

by ·Comments Off on Chronicle of a Summer (1961, Jean Rouch & Edgar Morin)

Before looking for critical articles and reading the Criterion extras, I supposed this was an important film for a few reasons. Firstly, it’s part of the French New Wave movement to bring the new, portable film cameras into the streets. Then it’s a portrait of the times, an ethnography of 1961 Parisians and their thoughts, two years before Le Joli Mai did similar work with a more political flavor. And it’s also a total meta-film, which I hadn’t realized going in.

Rouch & Morin introduce their “novel experiment of film-truth” to interviewer Marceline. I correctly assumed this was Marceline Loridan Ivens of A Tale of the Wind. Either I’d read it before, or she was mentioned in opening credits, or she’s just the only Marceline I know of. Anyway, they intend for her to ask people “how do you live? What do you do all day,” and everyone’s acting like this is the first time people have ever been interviewed on camera.

A backlit Marceline from the best shot in the film:

Then a montage of Marceline interviewing people on the street, or trying to, since nobody is much interested. I was afraid the whole movie would be like this. They find some people willing to talk (ahem, friends of the filmmakers) and hang out at their places. They find a black student named Landry, and one of the first questions is “so you don’t mind being black?” Marceline gets her own turn to speak, then they regroup and discuss their progress. “So far, the film has confined itself to take in the events of this summer of 1960,” then they bring in the war in Algeria, racism, the newly independent Congo, Marceline’s concentration camp tattoo (Landry: “I’ve seen a film about them, Night and Fog“) which leads into a dreamy monologue about her camp experience, and the movie starts to get interesting. Interview subject Angelo is being harassed by his employer for participating in the film. Landry goes to St. Tropez as “the black explorer of holiday France.” Morin: “You know Rouch and I are making a film. We don’t agree. Rouch thinks life is fun and I don’t.”

Landry:

This is the first movie I’ve seen to include its own test screening. Participants and non-participants give their reactions. “It’s completely phony.” “Extremely painful. When it’s not terrifyingly boring, it’s at the cost of total indecency.” Finally, the directors interview each other about the test screening results. “As soon as they’re more sincere than in life, they’re labelled either as hams or exhibitionists.” One of them finally decides the film is about the failure to communicate (isn’t that what all films are about?).

Morin was a sociologist who’d coined the phrase cinema-verite three years earlier. Rouch had already made 20 documentaries at this point (including Les Maître fous) and would make 80 more (including Rose and Landry two years later – a follow-up?). Produced by Argos Films (which released Night and Fog). The second most intense interview subject after Marceline is Cahiers du Cinema secretary Marilu Parolini, who later cowrote four Rivette films and The Spider’s Stratagem. Cameramen included Michel Brault (Mon Oncle Antoine) and Raoul Coutard (at least 15 Godard films).

Marilu…

and her boyfriend Jacques Rivette:

S. Di Iorio:

Morin was largely responsible for the film’s radical content: alternately analyst, priest, and spectator, he led the in-depth conversations that formed the backbone of the project and worked to facilitate moments of communal contact … Rouch, on the other hand, was concerned with form, and spent much of the production developing a walking-camera approach – they called it “pedovision” – that offset the closed-room structure of his partner’s scenes with renegade expeditions into contempo­rary France. While the film’s oscillation between sincere attention (Morin wanted to listen) and anarchic exuberance (Rouch brought water skis) almost justifies Morin’s self-deprecating description of the two of them as a kind of Martin and Lewis of ethnographic cinema, what matters more than these differences is the fact that, as partners, they shared fundamentally similar values. Both were confident that cinema offered a means to analyze everyday life; both believed that invaluable discoveries could result from what Lautréamont and the surrealists framed as the friction of unexpected encounters; both were convinced that their film would be determined by the chance associations and meandering pathways of open-ended conversations.
…
For Chronicle, Rouch and engineer André Coutant developed a prototype of the first handheld, sync-sound 16 mm camera ever used in France.

Morin:

I thought we would start from a basis of truth and that an even greater truth would develop. Now I realize that if we achieved anything, it was to present the problem of truth. We wanted to get away from theater, from spectacle, to enter into direct contact with life. But life is also theater, life is also spectacle.

by ·Comments Off on A Man Escaped (1956, Robert Bresson)

I’ve been watching Bresson’s earliest films in order, culminating in this extras-packed blu-ray of A Man Escaped. When I first started watching Bresson films (Au Hazard Balthazar, Lancelot of the Lake, The Devil Probably) I couldn’t figure out his style or why he was so acclaimed. Then I saw A Man Escaped and Pickpocket and loved them, but couldn’t say exactly why. Now I’m slowly figuring that out, though I still don’t really get Bresson’s worldview or what he means when he talks about his kind of cinema. He create subtle effects through careful modulation of elements that are usually more expressive: framing, editing and especially acting. This could lead to boredom, but he’s also using high-tension scenarios in A Man Escaped and Pickpocket, and the constant fear of getting caught clashes in interesting ways with the flat affect of the performance, plus this movie’s nonstop (sometimes redundant) narration provides the inner thoughts that the lead character’s blank expression hides. There are only brief bursts of music (I learned in the extras that Bresson plays Mozart whenever the lead character meets with someone who might aid his escape). All the movie’s tension and repression pays off after the final escape as Fontaine and his late-recruited cellmate Jost walk into the freedom of the night fog and the Mozart rises, the transcendence that Bresson was aiming for.

K. Elmore:

Bresson and André Devigny, the real-life former prisoner of war on whose experiences A Man Escaped was based, had differing ideas of what type of actor should be cast in the role of Fontaine. Feeling that the character must look physically capable of making the escape, Devigny presented Bresson with a young paratrooper and military triathlete. Bresson, however, was interested in making a “very psychological, very internal” film, as Devigny puts it, and chose the philosophy student François Leterrier, who, though he didn’t resemble Devigny in build, had very expressive eyes.

T. Pipolo:

The economy, purity, and rigor of Bresson’s aesthetic are directly related to his vision of the world, a complex perspective that carefully balances a belief in free will against the notion of preexistent design. For example, while A Man Escaped seems to be clearly mobilized by the protagonist’s will to be free, at the same time, Bresson said his aim was to “show the miracle [of] an invisible hand over the prison, directing what happens.” Thus, the propulsive trajectory of Bresson’s narratives — a result of the removal of excess and the refinement of technique — serves his overriding theme that human lives follow an implacable course. This is also apparent in such later masterpieces as Au hasard Balthazar (1966), Mouchette (1967), Lancelot of the Lake (1974), and L’argent (1983), despite their widely different subjects and increasingly cynical view of a world in which spiritual redemption seems to have vanished.

Elmore again:

Bresson put [assistant Louis] Malle in charge of Fontaine’s spoons, rope, hooks, and other escape implements, saying “Since you come from documentary, you take care of the props.”

Pipolo again:

Bresson’s method of creating character was not through the actor’s performance but through the actions performed — an approach that emphasized the external world and concrete reality. It is what a fictional figure does that creates character; his inner self is revealed by his outward actions and how he performs them. In short, action is character.

The Cineastes episode opens with long, uncommented section of Bresson films, then bursts of quickly-edited Bresson speaking philosophically, hating on filmed theater and escapism, finally settling down on an interview where he is hoping that filmmakers younger than himself can create the poetic “cinematograph” that he dreams of. It’s all very quotable, but he needs to use more examples so we’ll understand what he’s on about. Bresson also discusses his ideas for a cancelled film on Genesis. Listening to his theories, I started to wonder if Straub/Huillet were up to the same thing, but research (including my own post on Class Relations) says not exactly.

Bresson: “People say I was Rene Clair’s assistant. I never was. If I had been, I wouldn’t mind saying so.”

Functions of Film Sound is only about the sound of A Man Escaped. I’m amazed that he required 50 takes of some shots and still post-synched the whole thing – you’d think all the takes are required to get the vocal delivery just right, but that was just for the visual delivery – dialogue took another pile of takes a few weeks or months later.

Elmore:

All of the dialogue in the film was rerecorded in a studio. Bresson would say the line to the actor, and he would repeat it back to him, usually no fewer than forty to sixty times. Then Bresson edited together the best take of each word to re-create the line of dialogue.

The Essence of Forms opens with lead actor Francois Leterrier’s disclaimer that Bresson would not approve of any of this, then he gives stories and analysis of Bresson and his methods. “He never gave directions about interiority.”

Cinematographer Pierre Lhomme: “We saw several films together. He never liked them. He’d quiver in his seat, muttering ‘How can they do such things?’ It didn’t seem bad to me.”

The Road to Bresson: The filmmakers use the Story of Film technique of shooting their documentary footage in the style that their subject might use. This one quotes Bresson’s book and redundantly (in blu-ray terms) excerpts the Cineastes episode (however it also makes the point that Bresson used redundancy in his films). Good feature, and it was made after L’Argent so it covers a wider range of work than the others. I liked Paul Schrader’s explanation of transcendental film style, summarizing the book he wrote on Ozu, Bresson and Dreyer. Happy ending: for his final film, Bresson received a Cannes award alongside Tarkovsky, presented by Orson Welles.

Bresson gets a laugh at the press conference.
Q: “Why do you make films that frustrate viewers?”
RB: “What viewer are you talking about?”

by ·Comments Off on 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1966, Jean-Luc Godard)

“Mommy, what’s language?”
“Language is the house man lives in.”

Seems like a game-changer for Godard. His features just previous – Masculin Feminin, Pierrot le fou, Alphaville – have character-driven stories bursting with related (and unrelated) ideas. For this one, the ideas finally overwhelm the story, and it ends up more an essay film than a narrative, moreso even than the later Weekend (with which 2 or 3 Things shares a color/visual scheme). I haven’t seen Made In USA or La Chinoise, released between this one and Weekend, but it seems this marked the beginning of a new period, a brief fascination with social and economic issues before politics took total hold instead, but either way leaving behind the manic film-love of the first half of the 1960’s.

Nice of commentary-guy Adrian Martin to explain what is happening in what little narrative remains: a day in the life of a consumerist woman (Marina Vlady of Chimes at Midnight) coming from new high-rise suburban apartments to Paris to work as a prostitute. She speaks in nonsequitur inner thoughts and philosophies, often addressing the camera (as do the other characters), and Godard whispers narration, throws up title cards and takes total sidetracks (incl. pillow shots of road construction). Red/white/blue colors are prominent, as are images from commercial products.

Vlady: “Something can make me cry, but the cause of my tears can’t be found in the traces they leave on my cheeks. By this I mean you can describe everything that happens when I do something without necessarily indicating what makes me do what I do.”

The universe in a cup of coffee:

Vlady at left, with Anny Duperey of Stavisky:

Interminable sidetrack to a cafe where Juliet Berto and some dude have ineffective conversation, a couple of guys quote randomly from huge stacks of books, a prize winning poet converses with a young fan, and a woman ceaselessly plays a clattering pinball game.

Movie posters seen: Keaton’s The General (hung upside down), Ugetsu.
Mentioned: Nanook of the North.

The universe in a cigarette end:

A. Taubin says it’s also about “the city of Paris, which in the mid-1960s was at the center of de Gaulle’s project to modernize France. 2 or 3 Things depicts the violation of both the city and Juliette, who has bought into the Gaullist economy.”

The trailer has scenes interspersed with titles (“Her: the cruelty of neocapitalism… Her: the modern call girl… Her: the death of human beauty”), and is completely silent.