Summary
"I want to sleep with you again because you're beautiful," Michel says, to which Patricia replies, "I'm not." When Michel offers that she's ugly instead, Patricia asks, "Is it the same?" and walks away. Suddenly, Patricia wipes her eyes, weeping a little, and says, "I'll stare at you until you stop staring at me." "Me too," says Michel, and they stare at each other. Patricia holds up her poster, rolled up into a telescope, and looks at Michel through it. Then they begin kissing passionately.
Suddenly, Patricia goes and hangs the poster up in her bathroom, while Michel touches her sensually. "You like my poster?" she asks, hanging up a print of a Renoir painting. She then asks Michel if he thinks she's as pretty as the woman in the painting, but Michel simply alludes to the fact that he wants to sleep with her again. As Patricia washes her feet and Michel pees in the sink, Patricia tells him she's pregnant and that she thinks it's his. She tells him she's been to a doctor and is going in for more tests that week.
Abruptly Michel scolds her for not being more careful and leaves her in the bathroom, going to make a phone call to a man named Antonio. Antonio isn't there and Michel says he will call back, before calling Tolmachov, who owes him money. Tolmachov tells him that the police came looking for him, and Michel hangs up the phone.
Michel goes to Patricia, who brushes her hair in the bathroom, and he tells her she looks like a Martian up close. "Some idea, having a kid!" he says, and Patricia reassures him that it's not a sure thing. Michel tries to coax Patricia into sleeping with him again, then tells her that Americans are stupid because they like the stupidest French public figures. The phone rings and Michel goes to answer it, while Patricia covers her face with her hands in the mirror.
As Michel gets back in bed with a cigarette dangling from his lips, he tells Patricia he cannot locate the man who owes him money, as Patricia asks him if he wants to listen to the radio or a record. When Patricia gets off the bed, Michel touches her butt and she slaps him, much to his disappointment. She then puts on the radio and Michel asks her age, which is 20. He asks her to come to Italy and says there's no point in going to the Sorbonne. He then tells her he used to sell cars in New York and asks her if she's slept with many men. "Not too many," she says, holding up seven fingers. He holds up hands to indicate that he's slept with 42 people, and Patricia tells him she'd like to live in Mexico. Michel disagrees and compares it to Sweden, saying that he thought he would like the girls in Sweden, but "most of them are dogs like Parisian girls."
He tells Patricia that she is a 15 out of 20 and that she has a special something, as a siren goes by outside the window. When Michel asks her to say something nice about him, she doesn't know what to say, then tells him, "I want you to love me, but at the same time, I want you to stop loving me. I'm very independent, you know."
"I want to know what's behind your face," Patricia says, "I've looked at it for 10 minutes now, and I still know nothing, nothing." When he disparages her, she tells him she will put it all in the novel she's writing. She asks him if he's read William Faulkner, holding up one of his books, but Michel is unfamiliar. She holds up Wild Palms, and tells him it's one of her favorite books, before reading him a sentence from it: "Between grief and nothing, I will take grief." When she asks which Michel would choose, he tells her, "I want all or nothing," saying that grief is a compromise.
When Patricia tells Michel she wishes her name were Ingrid, he tells her to "sit on [her] haunches," which she does. He looks at her, covers himself with the sheet, and tells her he wants her to stay with him, to which she agrees. They each go under the sheets, and she says, "We're like happy elephants in hiding." Michel asks her if she would mind another man touching her, and she doesn't give a clear answer. They stay under the sheets for a while, and eventually Patricia gets up and turns off the radio, standing next to a poster on the wall, a photograph of someone who looks uncannily like her. She asks Michel if he knows the book by Dylan Thomas, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog.
Patricia gets dressed and Michel calls Antonio again, but he's still not there. When he hangs up, Patricia asks him which he likes the best about her: her eyes, mouth, or shoulders. Michel is silent as he gets dressed, and Patricia tells him she has to go to her office before heading to a press conference. When Michel says he will come with her, she agrees, then asks him if he was in the army. He tells her he "did in the sentries," and they begin to kiss on the bed as romantic music plays.
We see Paris as if from a plane, then Patricia and Michel sitting at an outdoor cafe. Michel goes to look for a car for them to use.
Analysis
Patricia and Michel are caught up in a complex psychological and sexual game in which neither of them is quite willing to be entirely vulnerable. While Michel is able to tell Patricia that he is in love with her, he struggles to present any evidence of his love beyond the fact that he's still hanging around her. Meanwhile, Patricia is confused and unsure of whether she loves him back. Their love becomes a kind of thread between them that they play with, a game that they are always playing. It is romantic in its own way, but also exceedingly distant.
The games the two lovers are playing with one another is typified by Patricia's line, "I'll stare at you until you stop staring at me." Michel responds, "Me too," and so they are caught in an eternal staring contest, each of them daring the other to make a move—to move on, to reject the other. In this way, their love is a passive, almost childlike one, fearful of abandonment, but unwilling to take any real risk. The more one of them pulls, the less the other one gives, and so on.
Continually, Godard uses camera angle and photography to tell the emotional story of his characters. After going back and forth in an ambiguous conversation, Patricia holds up her new poster and rolls it into a makeshift telescope to look at Michel. We see Michel as if through the telescope, as he smirks at Patricia seductively. The camera zooms in slowly on his expression, then the shot cuts abruptly to the two lovers kissing. Through photographic angles, Godard implicates the viewer in the action, pulling them into the affair. As the camera zooms in on Michel's face, the viewer is pulled into the seduction, an involvement that only continues as we watch their kisses from a particularly close and intimate angle. In this section, the camera becomes an extension of the erotic energy between the young lovers.
The conversations between Patricia and Michel are long and meandering, going from subject to subject abruptly. They seem to interrupt their own and one another's thoughts, expressing desire, then revealing something about their past, then making a bold statement, then talking about something more everyday. The scene in Patricia's apartment is long and circuitous, wandering through topics and dynamics in a way that feels very true to life. Godard chooses to eschew classic narrative arc and typical scene structure in order to present something that is more romantic, more accidental, more melancholic, and more beautiful.
One of the recurring tensions in the film is that between the surface of things and inner meaning: between external beauty the internal, emotional world. Michel is continually caught up in the surface of things, rating women, discussing beauty as well as action and the physical world. At one point, Patricia tells him, "I've looked at you for 10 minutes now, and I still know nothing, nothing." Where he wants for them to look at one another, touch one another, have a more externalized experience, Patricia is interested in that which cannot be seen, in understanding one another's internal lives. This difference between the two lovers is also explicated in their disciplines of choice. While he is an amateur gangster, an actor of sorts, and a character in the film of his own making, she is a novelist, interested in exploring the depths, in understanding psychology and getting a handle on human emotion.
