Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Writers: Marcel Sacotte, Jean-Luc Godard
Photography: Raoul Coutard
Music: Michel Legrand
Editors: Jean-Luc Godard, Agnes Guillemot
Cast: Anna Karina, Sady Rebbot, Andre S. Labarthe, Guylaine Schlumberger
In the opening titles Vivre Sa Vie is "dedicated to B movies." It's not the first time director and cowriter Jean-Luc Godard has done it, certainly in spirit, and it's a good reminder that we are entering Jean-Luc Godard-world, where fantasy and reality are all mixed up "playfully" (and/or for reasons of budget). Reality is generally a form of fantasy (notably when machine guns and gangsters appear) but it can also be text and factual information. I learned on IMDb that the script for Vivre Sa Vie is a single page, listing the 12 episodic scenarios, and the players improvised the dialogue from there. Cultural referents include Emile Zola, The Passion of Joan of Arc, and Jules and Jim playing a nearby theater (because why not?!).
Confoundingly, Godard's story of a middle-class woman who becomes a prostitute acknowledges but does not satisfy the impulse to project pathos on the story. Nana—yes, that's a big fat Zola shoutout, and she's played by JLG's beautiful wife for five years, Anna Karina—Nana is an obvious if cartoonish victim, eventually (spoiler) gunned down in the streets, in a convenient random meaningless plot development, slaughtered by two-bit movie actors in trench coats for a suitably reflexive existential-type playful bleak ending. Having executed such neat FIN we can ask what Godard may really be doing here, aside from fooling around with movie equipment.
In the opening titles Vivre Sa Vie is "dedicated to B movies." It's not the first time director and cowriter Jean-Luc Godard has done it, certainly in spirit, and it's a good reminder that we are entering Jean-Luc Godard-world, where fantasy and reality are all mixed up "playfully" (and/or for reasons of budget). Reality is generally a form of fantasy (notably when machine guns and gangsters appear) but it can also be text and factual information. I learned on IMDb that the script for Vivre Sa Vie is a single page, listing the 12 episodic scenarios, and the players improvised the dialogue from there. Cultural referents include Emile Zola, The Passion of Joan of Arc, and Jules and Jim playing a nearby theater (because why not?!).
Confoundingly, Godard's story of a middle-class woman who becomes a prostitute acknowledges but does not satisfy the impulse to project pathos on the story. Nana—yes, that's a big fat Zola shoutout, and she's played by JLG's beautiful wife for five years, Anna Karina—Nana is an obvious if cartoonish victim, eventually (spoiler) gunned down in the streets, in a convenient random meaningless plot development, slaughtered by two-bit movie actors in trench coats for a suitably reflexive existential-type playful bleak ending. Having executed such neat FIN we can ask what Godard may really be doing here, aside from fooling around with movie equipment.
Vivre Sa Vie is ostensibly a movie about a sympathetic middle-class woman who becomes a prostitute out of need for money, but it is thoroughly antiseptic, bowing to conventions and sensitivities that were much more restrictive in the early '60s. Certainly most of the squalor of street life and scoring, which has become such standard fare nowadays, is not part of this movie. And Godard is not just bowing to conventions. Nana is degraded by her work, she says as much, but boredom more than misery seems to be the problem. Existence is a likely culprit here.
Nana drifts into sex work at a relatively glacial pace, even in a short movie. Improvised scenes shot and taken as-is tend to bear the problem of inescapably feeling aimless and unfocused as the players feel their way through. I'm presuming Godard's method is closer to early John Cassavettes (perhaps aping Godard), shooting in the wild and taking what he gets, than to Martin Scorsese or later Cassavettes, where the improvising happens in rehearsals and the scene is virtually written by the time it's shot. But I think this problem of improvisation actually suits Godard's intent here well. It normalizes Nana's drift into the life and I think Godard wants that gnawing feeling of aimlessness because the movie is about the emptiness and boredom of middle-class life more than prostitution.
However, when he gets down to the nuts and bolts of sex work at the time in the early '60s, reciting a dispassionate litany of statistics and the requirements of laws, regulations, and customs, it becomes a much more interesting movie. I still feel some moral resistance or condescension to prostitution from Godard, although that could be my imagination and/or my own projections. I imagine Vivre Sa Vie was startlingly frank for the time, especially this section where he is laying out basically how it's done. It's a little reminiscent of the general how-to tone of Robert Bresson's Pickpocket. Unfortunately, the early '60s is entire eras away from us now in terms of sexual attitudes, sex work, and medical technology. I like seeing it treated this way here but it is almost all out of date now.
Godard as usual is otherwise electing to have it both ways as much as he can—the naturalism of Zola coupled with the fantasies of B movies and more generally his overweening romance with cinema. I was not impressed with sending Nana off to a movie matinee to look at The Passion of Joan of Arc and weep. If you're going to do this kind of thing, I prefer Roman Polanski in The Tenant sending his guy and a woman he has picked up under strange circumstances off to the movies to look at Enter the Dragon and grope one another. I thought the shoutout to Truffaut was a little embarrassing but sincerely intended, kind of like galumphing dog joy, like when John Cougar Mellencamp used to promote Prince's "Little Red Corvette" from the stage on tour in the early '80s.
Some of the fun stuff in Vivre Sa Vie includes a pop song written by Michel Legrand called "Nana's Dance," which plays on a jukebox with maximum rock 'n' 'roll cheese. The scene is sad and empty, because now Nana is a bored prostitute, but I loved the song. Groovy! In the same scene, one of Nana's pimp's gangster pals, Paul (Andre S. Labarthe), reveals himself as a mime and a clown and the movie briefly randomly detours there. Playful!
Toward the end of Vivre Sa Vie Nana starts asking a lot of existential questions and pondering heavy. The title translates and indeed Wikipedia refers to the movie as My Life to Live, and part of the exotics here is a woman with her own will, which again dates it somewhat severely. We generally accept now that women have their own will and right to make choices. It wasn't quite that way in 1962. And then the picture ends on its comical gangster note. "You shoot," one of these dopes says to the other. "I forgot to load." Thus is Nana gunned down in the street. Convention must have its due, Godard ironically suggests, even as he distances himself from the heavy-handed moral note with humor. Either way, she's still dead.
Nana drifts into sex work at a relatively glacial pace, even in a short movie. Improvised scenes shot and taken as-is tend to bear the problem of inescapably feeling aimless and unfocused as the players feel their way through. I'm presuming Godard's method is closer to early John Cassavettes (perhaps aping Godard), shooting in the wild and taking what he gets, than to Martin Scorsese or later Cassavettes, where the improvising happens in rehearsals and the scene is virtually written by the time it's shot. But I think this problem of improvisation actually suits Godard's intent here well. It normalizes Nana's drift into the life and I think Godard wants that gnawing feeling of aimlessness because the movie is about the emptiness and boredom of middle-class life more than prostitution.
However, when he gets down to the nuts and bolts of sex work at the time in the early '60s, reciting a dispassionate litany of statistics and the requirements of laws, regulations, and customs, it becomes a much more interesting movie. I still feel some moral resistance or condescension to prostitution from Godard, although that could be my imagination and/or my own projections. I imagine Vivre Sa Vie was startlingly frank for the time, especially this section where he is laying out basically how it's done. It's a little reminiscent of the general how-to tone of Robert Bresson's Pickpocket. Unfortunately, the early '60s is entire eras away from us now in terms of sexual attitudes, sex work, and medical technology. I like seeing it treated this way here but it is almost all out of date now.
Godard as usual is otherwise electing to have it both ways as much as he can—the naturalism of Zola coupled with the fantasies of B movies and more generally his overweening romance with cinema. I was not impressed with sending Nana off to a movie matinee to look at The Passion of Joan of Arc and weep. If you're going to do this kind of thing, I prefer Roman Polanski in The Tenant sending his guy and a woman he has picked up under strange circumstances off to the movies to look at Enter the Dragon and grope one another. I thought the shoutout to Truffaut was a little embarrassing but sincerely intended, kind of like galumphing dog joy, like when John Cougar Mellencamp used to promote Prince's "Little Red Corvette" from the stage on tour in the early '80s.
Some of the fun stuff in Vivre Sa Vie includes a pop song written by Michel Legrand called "Nana's Dance," which plays on a jukebox with maximum rock 'n' 'roll cheese. The scene is sad and empty, because now Nana is a bored prostitute, but I loved the song. Groovy! In the same scene, one of Nana's pimp's gangster pals, Paul (Andre S. Labarthe), reveals himself as a mime and a clown and the movie briefly randomly detours there. Playful!
Toward the end of Vivre Sa Vie Nana starts asking a lot of existential questions and pondering heavy. The title translates and indeed Wikipedia refers to the movie as My Life to Live, and part of the exotics here is a woman with her own will, which again dates it somewhat severely. We generally accept now that women have their own will and right to make choices. It wasn't quite that way in 1962. And then the picture ends on its comical gangster note. "You shoot," one of these dopes says to the other. "I forgot to load." Thus is Nana gunned down in the street. Convention must have its due, Godard ironically suggests, even as he distances himself from the heavy-handed moral note with humor. Either way, she's still dead.
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