Vivre sa Vie
Aarti Anney
FILM: VIVRE SA VIE (MY LIFE TO LIVE)
WRITTEN & DIRECTED BY: JEAN-LUC GODARD
CINEMATOGRAPHY: RAOUL COUTARD
CAST: ANNA KARINA (NANA), SADY REBBOT (RAOUL)
LANGUAGE: FRENCH
RUNNING TIME: 85 MIN
Vivre Sa Vie or My Life To Live is a story of a young woman Nana, who leaves her husband and her child to become an actress. As the story progresses she takes up a job at a record store, gets shown the door by her landlady and eventually drifts into prostitution as her chances of becoming an actress fade into oblivion.
Vivre Sa Vie catalogues the nature of all things modern thus rendering this film as the start of the new-wave of French cinema. It's saturated with quotations from, and observations about, the popular or consumerist culture of Godard's Paris; a shiny new world of cinemas, coffee bars, neon-lit pool parlors, pop records, wall-posters, pin-ups, pinball machines, juke-boxes, foreign cars, the latest hair-styles, typewriters, advertising and Americanisms. The treatment of Vivre…from the first frame to the last is to do justice to the real. One of Godard's starkest moves to disclose the fakeness and artificiality of cinema is to break up the film into a series of 12 tableaux or chapters, much like a play or a book. Each chapter is preceded by a heading which talks of the scene and/or describes the mood, introduces characters or provokes a question in the mind of the viewer. In an interview, Godard explains his motive for the division: "why twelve, I don't know; but in tableaux to emphasize the theatrical, Brechtian style. I wanted to show the 'Adventures of Nana So-and-So' side of it. The end of the film is very theatrical too: the final tableaux had to be even more so than the rest." (Narboni and Milne 187).
Vivre Sa Vie, as a whole has elements which clash (as Godard intended) rather than harmonize. The film is indeterminate, playful, open and largely incomplete. It's also far too complicated and contradictory to fit into any one single category. On one level it's a documentary about prostitution. Moving on from there, it's a "dramatized documentary" using its central character to present a typical case-history. But the case-history is extended into pure fiction to become the story of a young woman seeking her place in an elusive and alien world. 'at its most fictional the film again becomes documentary - as sketches of life in Paris in 1962 and as a portrait of Anna Karina" (Perkins 34).
The 12 tableaux of the film pretty much remain "a series of pure, unrelated incidents in time", inasmuch as the film itself, and thus the viewer fails to unify Nana's biographical experience. This is best explained by Susan Sontag, the cultural critic who in 1964 (two years after the film premiered) wrote:
"An art concerned with social, topical issues can never simply show that something is. It must indicate how. It must show why. But the whole point of Vivre sa vie is that it does not explain anything. It rejects causality. . . . Godard in Vivre sa vie [does not] give us any explanation, of an ordinary recognizable sort, as to what led the principal character, Nana, ever to become a prostitute. . . . All Godard shows us is that she did become a prostitute. Again, Godard does not show us why, at the end of the film, Nana's pimp Raoul "sells" her, or what has happened between them, or what lies behind the final gun battle in the street in which Nana is killed. He only shows us that she is sold, that she does die. He does not analyze. He proves." ("Godard's Vivre Sa Vie" 199)
The performance by Anna Karina (Godard's wife at the time) as Nana is beyond brilliant. She perfectly captures the essence and nuances of her character. Nana's bobbed haircut replicates the one made famous by Louise Brooks in the 1928 film Pandora's Box, where the doomed heroine also drifts into a life of prostitution and violent death. Karina has a distant attractiveness about her which helps her character seem disconnected, flighty and in parts like a child crying for the moon. Nana smokes, she has a lot of sex, and she has talks that sometimes don't go anywhere, but the viewer is never really let into who she really is or what her motives are. The fact that this comes through in Karina's performance is "a credit to her, as well as Godard, in creating this memorable figure in the early 60's New-wave of French cinema". An interesting bit of information is that her performance was mainly improvised as Godard refused to give Karina her lines until just before each scene was shot. In order to maintain the freshness of the performances, Godard rarely made more than one take of each shot!
The film is brilliantly captured in stunning black and white images by Raoul Coutard, who has worked with Godard on numerous films. Many of the core cinematic techniques Godard uses in this film- such as improvised shots and narration of a series of disjointed episodes- have become characteristic of what is known as "Godard's style". Their understanding of each other is perfectly showcased in their joint efforts…a working example of hand and glove. Like all of Godard's films, it has a distinct sound world and throughout the film the visual impact is supported by amplified ambient sounds, long stretches of silence and an "austerely" beautiful music score by Michel Legrand.
Susan Sontag has described Godard's achievement in Vivre Sa Vie as "a perfect film" and "one of the most extraordinary, beautiful, and original works of art that I know of. It is the film that underlines this director's status as one of the most accomplished modernist artists of the second half of the 20th century."
In the film philosopher Brice Parain says, "Expressing is to catch each moment of thinking. But to say something you really want to say, you must experience a life without words." In my opinion, Godard seems to have done just that with images.
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