Vivre sa vie: Film en douze tableaux

There is a bleakness to this movie, which has a pretty and thoughtful young woman (Anna Karina), living in beautiful Paris, and yet descending into prostitution following a break-up. Director Jean-Luc Godard gives us twelve vignettes that are intentionally simple and unassuming to paint the picture. It's worth seeing, but at least for me, there are better French New Wave pictures, and certainly less depressing ones.

Anna Karina is lovely but I don't think she delivered a lot of range in this performance. One major exception early on in her new job is when she desperately tries to avoid a customer's kiss on the mouth. The look in her eyes as she squirms around is heart-rending, and disabuses us of any ooh-la-la fantasies we may have about her in this role. Another nice scene is when she dances to a jukebox song with awkward cuteness, trying to entice the few men watching her.

To his credit, Godard is unflinching in his honesty, and there is no sentimentality here. I loved the thoughtful scenes, the one where she's in the theater watching the 1928 Carl Theodor Dreyer film 'The Passion of Joan of Arc', and then later picking an older man's brain about philosophy in a café. The street scenes in Paris were nice to see, though sometimes the film comes close to descending into a home movie project.

Godard was making a point about the realities of life, and employing new filmmaking techniques while telling the story. It doesn't always make for great entertainment though, such as the section that's almost a mini-documentary on prostitution in Paris at the time. The ending is also ridiculously abrupt; it is a grand statement but to me borders on pretentiousness. Is it over-compensating for not showing some of the more painful aspects of prostitution along the way? (STD's, being beaten up, being degraded, etc?). Until then, with the exception of the attempted kiss scene, the 'insight' we get is mostly just a beautiful model being bored by her tricks. From Godard, I much preferred 'Masculin Feminin' (1966), so if you're new to him, I would start there instead. You may also try the Truffaut film we see on the marquee of a theater towards the end, 'Jules and Jim' (1962), which was a nice little tip of the cap to his fellow director.

My father had a lot of trouble to explain me what those men were doing, laying against the wall on a busy Sunday street, where there were a number of women in flashy clothes going up and down the street, looking at the men who passed by instead of doing window-shopping like me, and my father. It was 1954, in Lisbon. I came to know the men were pimps, and although I always respected the 'girls who were in the life', the pimp became my pet hate, to this day.

Does Goddard make an outstanding political speech here? I'm not sure. But now I understand why everybody was speaking of his 'Nana' in the Sixties. It's a poignant story, clear and sharp, with no tears but more like a gut punch. Particularly for the (unexpected?) ending. I disagree with those who said that the 12 scenes of the movie are 'unconnected'. They are connected! But the film should be fully appreciated on a second viewing for it, may be. These days, people are not able to cope with this much philosophy in a single film.

It's also a sad world when you discover, in 2001, that this film runs 85 minutes in the USA, 83m in Portugal, and 80m in France (it's so described in "Cinéguide" des Presses de la Cité (ed.1992). France shows the most short of the current versions of this wonderful movie about streetwalkers and pimps, about workers and profiteers; therefore, the most 'cut' or censored version - be it political or commercial censorship. France! the country that represented for me Liberty, Fraternity and Equality, when I was a 6 year-old kid opening his eyes to the beauty of chandeliers in a shop window, the beauty of girls in high-heels and knee-length skirts, and the wrongness of the half part of the world who lived without working, squeezing money of those who worked. Even if the work was - like Nana's - lending her body to other people...

Yes, this is something I had to watch for uni, could you tell?

Amazingly, even though I'm in my second year, this is the first Godard film I've seen, and while I can definitely say I love his direction, I can't say much else about this really grabbed me.

It's only 80 minutes long, but even then I was getting a little bored by the end, and I think it can only be put down to the fact that for all the many gorgeous shots that ensure Anna Karina has as much room as possible to show off her performance (which is really good to be fair), I simply don't care about her.

There's really nothing special about the story to me, not after nearly 60 years of these kinds of dramas becoming quite common in the French New Wave's wake, and good god is the ending the very definition of an anticlimax.

I'm also not a big fan of how the plot seems to grind to a halt every so often so the characters can have a long philosophical quote-off, and the more I think about it, the more I could have narrowed all this down to the simple fact that I don't really care about the main character, and leave it there.

But I think I'll eventually see a Godard film that does really grab me the way this one unfortunately didn't, because he is responsible for nearly all the best parts of this film. Every shot is beautifully thought out, the editing is precise as hell, and he brought a great performance out of all the actors.

And since I'm a film student, I give it an average of three weeks before I'm forced to see another one, so fingers crossed.

The French New Wave remains one of the finest movements in film history. Jean-Luc Godard was one of the most innovative filmmakers to emerge from this movement, and Vivre sa vie is one of the best films ever. Long before the Hong Kong cinema proved substance could be downplayed with style, Godard was doing it. The film's plot follows a woman's descent into prostitution, but the story isn't what people will talk about after viewing the film. Godard breaks every Hollywood rule and pulls it off nicely.

If you want to see the conventions of Hollywood broken and a true auteur at work, rent Vivre sa vie.

As the film opens Paul and Nana are going through a break-up. Each is filmed with their back to the camera. As Nana says she wants to die, it makes me think that, when we turn our back on the most significant person in our life, it can be like turning our backs on life itself. Such a big part of our identity is bound up with them that there seems nothing left. It is as if we have failed to heed the advice of Montaigne, quoted at the end of the opening credits: "Lend yourself to others and give yourself to yourself." Of course, Godard may not be intending for me to have such thoughts. For much of the film I get the distinct impression that he does not want me to interpret anything as anything, but just to accept it as it is. But the film, within a few minutes, has sparked off some interesting and worthwhile thought in me and I like this. It seems to be what art should do. And that it should do it simply by existing, not by trying to convey some message of its own.

For much of the film that follows, part of my mind is taken up with enjoying the crisp black and white photography. The streets of Paris, and other simple but finely observed detail. The lustre of Anna Karina's hair – she plays Nana – is as enchanting as if I were talking to her. And maybe talking about nothing very much in particular so that my mind could wander to such things. The quality of the print is sufficient to make out individual hairs – or hairline cracks in walls and furniture.

The overall effect – taken with some other devices that I only slowly become aware of – is to give a documentary-like feel to what the camera is seeing. Nana splits from Paul and drifts into prostitution. It happens without any big dramatics. She has been working in a record store, is having trouble paying her back rent, and, after a few other minor incidents, we see her with her first client. The look of repressed emotion on her face is one of the most stark and memorable images in the film. A bit like Edvard Munch's painting, The Scream. But sublimated into what is portrayed as a very everyday setting.

Later, in a rapid monotone, Nana's pimp even gives us a run-down of prices, laws, regulations and practices. It is almost the Brechtian splitting of the film into twelve chapters (each with long titles telling us what is about to happen), and Godard's increasingly frequent experiments that separate the sound from the image, that remind us this is fiction, not docu-drama.

For instance, towards the end and when Nana is with a young man she rather likes (and the attraction seems mutual, maybe love), their conversation is not heard by us but only seen on the screen as subtitles. They are communicating soundlessly perhaps, as lovers do.

There is a long scene where she discusses the meaning of language with an old man, a philosopher (played by Godard's former philosophy teacher). Although this is outwardly quite deep, I did not find the arguments nearly as profound or rigorous as in Godard's later film, 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her. Prostitution is not used here, as it is in 2 or 3 things, as a political metaphor. Susan Sontag, in her aptly titled essays, Against Interpretation, suggests that it is, "the most radical metaphor for the separating out of the elements of a life – as a testing ground, a crucible for the study of what is essential and what is superfluous in a life." She sees Nana as having divested herself of her old identity and taken on her new identity – that of a prostitute.

In the version I watched, quite a few lines were omitted from the English subtitling, so my smattering of French came in useful. But I needed some of the subtler French puns on the 'life' and 'chickens' pointed out to me.

As the film came to its not untypically Godard-like abrupt ending, I wondered for a minute if it was as great as some people often claim. The celebrated critic Roger Ebert, for instance, singles it out as one of the great movies of all time. My mind wandered to such movies as Last Year at Marienbad, and Jules and Jim, both made about the same time and which have left quite a deep impression on me. But only for a minute.

Vivre Sa Vie is different, yet again, to any other work by Godard. But it is deceptively unassuming, and a remarkably solid piece of work for all its sense of transience (Godard compared cinema to a train rather than the station). It can also be seen as a love letter from Godard to his wife, the beautifully photographed Anna Karina.