Number Two

Announced by Godard as a remake of BREATHLESS (a ploy to get financing), this video project has almost nothing to do with his 1959 masterpiece. Battistella and Dudry are a dissatisfied couple who suffer from physical ailments. Battistella is stricken with chronic constipation, and her husband is unable to perform sexually. They teach their children about sex by showing them, and the grandparents, naked, speak directly to the camera. As Richard Roud writes, "although NUMERO DEUX is a frustrating film about frustration, a constipated film about constipation, it is not entirely without a sense of hope." Shot on videotape (and later transferred to film), the majority o...