The source of inspiration for Two or Three Things I Know About Her was a news article describing the advent of “shooting stars,” or suburban housewives who prostitute themselves in the afternoon by way of cleverly managing inadequate household budgets. The films covers twenty-four hours in the life of such a woman (Marina Vlady) living with her garage-mechanic husband and two children in a housing project on the outskirts of Paris. But the “her” in the film's title is Paris itself, a metropolis in the throes of dehumanizing redevelopment under Gaullist capitalism. For Godard, the new Paris represents an epiphany of contemporary malaise and enforced disintegration of communication. Here, prostitution is an existential condition, and his incisive film is above all a phenomenological study of the reversal that has taken place in the subject-object relationship between people and their world. Godard's vision is inseparable from Raoul Coutard's breathtaking color cinematography, in which objects emerge triumphant--bubbling forth with life like the hot coffee cup that fills the wide screen--while the human--anxious, uncertain even of her own physical existence--diminishes in the wake of the future.