Jean-Luc Godard (1962)
The full French title of Godard’s fourth film is Vivre sa vie: film en douze tableaux. The title’s English translations include To Live Her Life, My Life to Live and It’s My Life. The first of those is awkwardly literal – it sounds like a translation. The second and third misrepresent the picture’s style and mood, not least because of their similarity to the 1958 Hollywood melodrama I Want to Live! This note will stick with Vivre sa vie.
In the first of the twelve tableaux or episodes, all of them set in Paris, a young woman called Nana Kleinfrankenheim (Anna Karina) breaks up with her husband. She has ambitions to be an actress but what follows largely describes how she starts working as a prostitute in order to support herself. (Godard’s title can thus be interpreted either as a straightforward description of what he shows on screen or as an ironic comment on the limited options open to Nana for how she’ll survive on her own.) The imaginative variety of form of the tableaux is a large part of what makes Vivre sa vie so bracing and absorbing – in conjunction with the remarkable combination of limited camera movement and visual dynamism that characterises several of the tableaux. (Raoul Coutard did the black-and-white cinematography; the editor was Agnès Guillemot.) In one episode, Nana sits in a cinema, watching Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc: tears roll down the cheeks of both Falconetti’s Joan, as she prepares for death, and Nana, as she gazes at her. Nana weeps as noiselessly as Falconetti in the silent film on the screen. In subsequent tableaux, Nana talks with Raoul (Sady Rebbot), the man who’ll become her pimp: first, at a table in a cafeteria high in a building with a window looking out on the expanse of Paris beyond and below; then, in a conversation in which he dispassionately recites the rules and regulations for working as a prostitute and she occasionally requests clarification. A later episode consists of Nana’s writing a letter of application to a brothel madam: Godard’s camera stays throughout on the initially blank page on which the letter is being composed.
Each episode is prefaced by an intertitle. The introduction to the last but two describes how Nana ‘fait la philosophie sans le savoir’. (Nana has already shown a repeated tendency to aphorise: non-French viewers may therefore be surprised to see her labelled as ‘the unwitting philosopher’ but will likely realise her verbal style is only to be expected in a French movie.) She strikes up a conversation in a café-bar with an elderly man – about speech and silence, the dependence of thinking on the words whereby thoughts are formed, and so on. It’s clear that her interlocutor here – and he does most of the talking – is either a superb naturalistic actor or a real-life intellectual. He turns out to be the latter – a philosopher and essayist called Brice Parain (who was Godard’s philosophy tutor: his surname is one ‘r’ short of being the French for ‘godfather’). What Parain says has such precision and momentum that it’s completely absorbing. It almost removes you from the world of the film – until Nana looks into the camera, as if to remind the audience that this is still her story and that Parain needs to be kept in context. In the final episode Nana is sold by Raoul to another pimp. An argument breaks out among the men at the exchange. Shots are fired. Nana is killed. Her fall to the ground and body lying in the street naturally bring to mind the death of Jean-Paul Belmondo’s Michel in Breathless but the killing of Nana is more shocking in that it happens so abruptly and arbitrarily. Belmondo’s Michel is consciously – he says daily – preoccupied with thoughts of death: Joan of Arc’s agony and gunfire earlier in the film, in the street outside a bar in which Nana is drinking, foreshadow but don’t obviously signal her eventual fate.
Anna Karina, who was married to Godard when they made Vivre sa vie, is increasingly appealing as Nana. It’s remarkable how the character enlarges – and how little this depends on conventional theatrical opportunities to enlarge a character – over the course of the film. Karina’s presence counterbalances the academic flavour of the movie that results from a plethora of literary and cinematic quotations (some more explicit than others). The succession of scenes of Nana at work in impersonal rooms is cumulatively lowering yet there are surprising shifts in tone within these scenes. Among the mostly faceless clients, Nana’s first (Gilles Quéant) is an arresting exception. A sequence in which another of her johns wants to involve a third party sends Nana searching hurriedly, in nearby rooms in the brothel, for a co-worker who’ll help out: the rapid opening and shutting of doors turns this into a singular, thirty-second French farce. Vivre sa vie features one of Michel Legrand’s best scores. I could have done without (a) the Jean Ferrat chanson ‘Ma môme’, which plays on a jukebox, and (b) Nana’s dance to another jukebox number, this one an instrumental. A bit in which an acquaintance of Raoul mimes (with limited sound effects) a kid blowing up a balloon is surprisingly enjoyable, however.
18 January 2016
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