PARIS WAS A WOMAN Vlady searches for signs.

The Her in the title of Jean-Luc Godard’s midperiod masterpiece (one of many made between 1963 and ’67) has a dual referent—the film’s anti-star, Marina Vlady, playing a Parisian housewife named Juliette Janson, and the city of Paris—the first of many plays on words. “Mama, what’s language?” Juliette’s precocious son asks. The answer: “Language is the house man lives in,” a paraphrase of Heidegger. Godard’s own language (his voiceover is whispered conspiratorially throughout the movie) interrogates politics, prostitution (the film was inspired by a series of 1966 articles about Parisian housewives turning tricks), conspicuous consumption—and himself. “I forget everything, except that I’m back at zero and I have to start from there,” the director confesses.

Filmgoers, too, may find themselves forgetting everything they once knew about watching movies; Godard, in Brechtian mode, deliberately distances audiences, constantly interrupting the “action” and refusing to psychologize his characters. The acting is in quotation marks; what’s most important is the system of signs. Those not familiar with semiotics need not despair; the sound of Two or Three Things may be greatly inspired by Roland Barthes and Ferdinand de Saussure, but the look is pure pop. The French tricolor forms the bold palette of the redoubtable cinematographer Raoul Coutard; visual set pieces include the magnificent imagining of the birth of the cosmos in a coffee cup. In a cine-tract with thousands of ideas a minute, the film’s beauty never fails to transfix you. (Opens Fri; Film Forum.)—Melissa Anderson