Number Two

Initially pitched to his producers as a remake of Breathless, Godard’s first long-form experiment with video ultimately had only the most tenuous connection to his celebrated debut. Number Two is instead an intimate, at times raw look at a French family of the 1970s, complete with an uncommonly frank depiction of the sexual dynamic within a married couple. While the film abounds with Godardian binaries—man/woman; parent/child; cinema/television; landscape/factory—perhaps the most fruitful dialogue is between the filmmaker himself, shown operating video machines in his studio in Grenoble, and Sandrine, the homemaker who appears on video monitors speaking words largely drawn from Godard’s private conversations with his co-producer and life partner Anne-Marie Miéville. According to Daney’s framing, in Number Two, the Voice is Her and the Eye is Him, and the sound/image tension at the core of Godard’s cinematic project reaches a new complexity.