‘Vivre Sa Vie’DEEP INTO Vivre Sa Vie, Jean-Luc Godard’s 1962 feature, Nana (Anna Karina), a young woman who has turned to prostitution, engages in a long conversation with an elderly man (played by French philosopher Brice Parain). They soon reach the meat of much of Godard’s filmmaking: the impossibility of untangling thought and language. The philosopher tells a story about a character from Dumas; when he actually contemplated what it meant to “run,” he was immobilized and could not run from danger: “The first time he thought, it killed him.” To speak (and in Godard’s case, to speak in conjunction with moving images) is fatal, the philosopher goes on, but we can’t live without speaking. Vivre Sa Vie is full of speaking. We see Nana and her estranged boyfriend from behind at a cafe counter dissecting their relationship. In one set shot, the camera focuses on a cheap motel room while Nana and her trick move in and out of frame discussing the economics of their liaison. An unidentified narrator recites facts about the laws governing prostitution in France. Always looking for ways to interrupt the normal expectations of narrative, Godard stops the spoken dialogue and substitutes subtitles; sometimes, all music, all talk, all background noises suddenly cease, then jarringly return.
The film, told in 12 chapters and beautifully filmed in black-and-white by Raoul Coutard, doesn’t moralize about prostitution, nor does it shy from the danger and degradation, although it does so without sensationalism. Most of all, the film is a remarkable record of Godard’s relationship with Karina (his wife at the time). She wears a smooth encasing hairdo with deep dark bangs that set off her exquisitely large eyes. It is (as critic Michael Atkinson writes in the accompanying booklet) the Louise Brooks bob that passed through Karina to Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction. Two famous moments remain indelible: Karina, tears forming, sitting in a cinema watching Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc; and Karina doing a jivey dance to a pop tune on a jukebox. It looks forward, again, to Tarantino and the Jack Rabbit Slim scene; it also harks back to the end of John Huston’s Asphalt Jungle, when Sam Jaffe can’t resist the sight of a young girl solo dancing to a jukebox. As the 1962 interview with Karina included with this Criterion DVD says, “She makes up her face and bares her heart.” (The disc also includes an interview with scholar Jean Narboni, some background material on prostitution, and Godard’s original trailer, a work of montage art unto itself.)
Vivre Sa Vie
Criterion
$39.95
