Review of Number Two (1975) by Kirk J — 06 Sep 2007

Even if a lot of this doesn't work, I admire Godard and Miéville for sheer audacity. A plot synopsis feels a bit beside the point for this film, but the "story" (not much actually happens) concerns a nuclear family (father, mother, son, daughter) in a cramped apartment.

The parents have sex a lot and the children watch sometimes, and there are many conversations in between. These sequences, which appear to have been shot on video, are played on monitors which Godard has re-shot in 35mm, sometimes putting as many as three monitors in the same frame (and more than that if you count superimposition).

The whole film seems quite daring. I'm not sure how much of that is the filmmakers' intention and how much of it comes from growing up in a context where sex is feared and hated. There is certainly no way this ever could have been made in the USA.

In one scene, for example, as we watch the mother showering her naked daughter, the girl asks, "Do all girls have a hole? Is that where memory comes out?" and in another scene the parents, lying naked in bed, explain their genitals to their children.

("With this mouth," the father says, pointing to his penis, "we kiss the lips of love.") The film is bookended by segments where Godard examines the film itself and his thought process in making it.

This being Godard, that of course only makes everything even more confounding rather than clearer, perhaps even moreso here than usual, because instead of his typical assertiveness, his comments here are drowned in self-doubt.

This means the film is not just about what's happening to the family and the ideas and analogs Godard extracts from that aspect (which touch on Vietnam, Maoism, and feminism, to name a few) but it's also about the making of the film itself, and it's about Godard's filmmaking efforts in the larger context of the world that is already being examined within the film itself.

To put it mildly, there's an almost excessive amount of levels to this work.