My Life to Live
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Movie Reviews of My Life to Live
Movie Review: "La vie c'est la vie"
Summary: 5 Stars
This is the film about Nana(Karina),a young girl from the provinces who has been living in Paris for some time. Godard's film is in 12 episodes showing a young woman drifting towards prostitution,showing her most important experiences.The film is free of any sort of moralising,allowing the audience to find its own meaning in what it sees.The film's epigraph by Montaigne,says you have to give yourself to others and not only to yourself.Each episode is given a title.e.g.'A café.Nana wants to leave Paul.A Pin Table','Afternoons.Money.Washbasins.Pleasure Hotels.'etc.
There are scenes that are shot unconventionally.In the opening scene inside a coffee house,Paul and Nana are talking while seated at the counter,but they are shot from behind so we only see the backs of their heads.They are everyman and woman.Paul is an unsuccessful journalist.Though Nana still loves Paul,she feels a need for change. Nana is shown working in a record shop.She tries to borrow a few thousand francs to pay her rent arrears,but is unsuccessful.Her landlady refuses her entry unless she first pays back the rent.She spends her last few francs going to see Dreyer's Joan of Arc at a movie house.This scene is incredibly moving.
This sets up the Brechtian alienation device:since what the viewer sees is also what the character sees,the viewer identifies itself with this character,because this character guides our look.The character we see in this film has come herself to watch another film.We know there is a difference between illusion and reality.Tears are streaming down Karina's face.The lowly prostitute like the Saint will be sacrificed.Both have been given images by their patriarchal societies and condemned because of it.The viewer has a role in the system of film,prostitution is due to a social system.Godard does not treat film as escapism,he draws on parallels between high art,low culture.
Later a scene plays out at a table in a café between Nana and her pimp.The camera moves around them catching them in an odd profile two shot,her face is eclipsed by her pimp's head a few times,their faces jutting in from opposite sides of the frame just as he asks her to smile,she says she can't but the shot is held until she breaks and smiles,submitting her innocence to his will.There are scenes where Nana,seen practising as a prostitute, changes from amateur to professional.A montage-sequence in Tableau 8,the voice-over explains the result of a 1959 social expose of prostitution, comments on Nana's situation.But its Nana's gestures and expressions,not body, that are shown.Her boyfriend quotes Poe,she talks to a philosopher,safeguarding her soul while selling her body.
Nana sits in another café and discusses life,thought,language and existence with an elderly philosopher(Brice Parain playing himself).She complains how hard she finds it to express herself,the meaninglessness of words.He says it's not possible to live without talking.Words should express just what one wants to say.We must think and for thought one needs words.One must speak in a way that obeys being in good faith.This philosopher influenced Camus,greatly.Godard said this film was `existentialist'in outlook,not in opposition to 'essence'.Is our language false at the very moment when we think we are telling the truth?
Freshness,vivacity,piquancy,emotion,dynamism are all qualities of the film.Nana is self-aware and wishes to escape the banality of things,having wanted to get into acting.Karina is an incredible actress,with a Louise Brooks-like face,her eyes like jewels,Godard's muse and wife at the time.Godard improvised wildly,rehearsing a lot before doing one or two takes,his film has the freshness of jazz.His street scenes capture the fizz and energy of 60s Paris,vivid street scenes, trapping emotions of the age through Nana's experiences, filtered through the brilliance of Coutard's cinematography.Unforgettable is the image of the pool table dance of Karina.Pure joy.
Movie Review: The Magnificent Anna Karina
Summary: 5 Stars
This is Godard's most austere film. Its also one of his best. Anna Karina is in every shot and you never get tired of looking into those sad, beautiful, hopeful eyes. The most heartwrenching part of the story is that no matter how far she descends into the grim world of prostitution she remains somehow innocent and to be truthful the world of prostitution actually doesn't look all that grim(her clients are polite, they always pay, there are no drugs, or beatings). She survives not by becoming detached but by remaining inquisitive and continuing to find things that interest her. She loves the film Passion of Joan of Arc, and she loves the Poe story her boyfriend reads, and she enjoys the company of anyone with fresh ideas or a different perspective. She might be a prostitute but she never stops being a human being first and she never stops seeing men as individuals and so she never stops liking them, even when they might see her and treat her merely as a type. Though she can sense the tragedy in someone elses life like Joan of Arcs she does not view herself as being tragic. She might be a prostitute but she does not seem ashamed of this, but rather just sees it as a job. You could almost say she is amused by her own situation. Its her intense awareness of life and her own freedom to live as she chooses and think and feel what she wants to that make her such a fascinating creature. In fact its the moment after she has her first client that she seems to really become fully aware of herself as a truly free creature. Karina's sense of freedom contrasts in an interesting way with her occupation and the films structure which sets a decidedly deterministic, even fatalistic, tone and pace. I do agree that the ending seems too easy and abrupt -- many of Godards films end with a kind of suddeness that makes them feel somehow incomplete. The French title of Breathless is Out of Breath and this seems to be Godards ruling principle -- film until you run out of ideas(out of breath) and then kill off your protaganist(this happens in Breathless, My Life To Live, and Pierrot le Fou). But whether you like the ending or not the rest of the film is so perfect that the film and especialy Karina's face, her attitudes and expressions, linger in your thoughts long after the film is over. Usually Jean-Luc Godard's style is the star of a Jean-Luc Godard but this is Anna Karina's movie. Cinematographer Coutard as usual does a tremendous job. I think my favorite Anna Karina film is Jacque Rivette's The Nun (La Religieuse)but this a close second. She is way more interesting than any of the other beauties of the era, and one suspects that she is as creative and original as Godard himself.Movie Review: One of Godard's finest films deserving a restoration.
Summary: 5 Stars
My Life to Live (Vivre sa Vie: Film en Douze Tableaux) is among my five favorite Godard films. (Others I would include on that list include Band of Outsiders (Bande à part), Breathless, and Pierrot le Fou.) Anna Karina (Godard's wife at the time) plays Nana, a Parisian mother and aspiring actress whose financial circumstances lead her into a life of prostitution. Godard's film is no Hollywood Pretty Woman. It takes a cinéma vérité, documentary approach toward its subject, separating the film into 12 tableaux, to examine the life of a prostitute from a sociological perspective. Those twelve revealing tableaux titles include:
Tableau one: A bistro. Nana wants to leave Paul. Pinball.
Tableau two: The record shop. 2000 francs. Nana lives her life.
Tableau three: The concierge. The passion of Joan of Arc. A journalist.
Tableau four: The police. Nana is questioned.
Tableau five: The outer boulevards. The first man. The hotel room.
Tableau six: Yvette. A café in the suburbs. Raoul. Machine gun fire.
Tableau seven: The letter. Raoul again. The Champs Élysées.
Tableau eight: Afternoons. Money. Wash-basins. Pleasure. Hotels.
Tableau nine: A young man. Nana wonders if she's happy.
Tableau ten: The sidewalk. A man. There's no gaiety in happiness.
Tableau eleven: Place de Chatelet. The stranger. Nana the unwitting philosopher.
Tableau twelve: The young man again. The oval portrait. Raoul sells Nana.
The resulting film is both intelligent and poetic, offering many insights into Parisian culture of the early 60s (cinema, cafes, pop music, hairstyles, gangsters), and featuring a beautiful score by Michel Legrand. Cultural critic, Susan Sontag, describes Godard's film as "a perfect film." I agree, but my one, small complaint with this DVD relates to its poor film-to-DVD transfer quality. My Life to Live deserves a quality restoration by Criterion.
G. Merritt
Movie Review: One of Godard's best
Summary: 5 Stars
My Life to Live is a highly stylized and extraordinarily unformulaic adaptation of a simple premise: a young woman, seeking the freedom and excitement of, what Federico Fellini calls La Dolce Vita, leaves her family to pursue an acting career, only to turn to a life of prostitution. From the opening sequence showing a detached, seemingly clinical exhibition of Anna Karina's face and profile, followed by an uneasy dialogue between Nana (Karina) and Paul (Andre-S. Labarthe) filmed at an angle showing the backs of their heads, we are introduced to the singular, iconoclastic vision that is Jean-Luc Godard. Stripped of expression and sentimentality, Godard, nevertheless, succeeds in creating a film that is visually stunning and full of pathos. We are drawn to Anna, not because of her seductive persona or compassionate actions, but because she is humanity, lost and desperate, incapable of comprehending her misery nor articulating her pain (Note the parallel character of Antonio Ricci in Vittorio de Sica's The Bicycle Thief.
Godard's revolutionary camerawork transcends nouvelle vague novelty: it serves as a cinematic extension of Nana's soul. The awkward angles and long panning shots during Nana and Paul's conversations reveals the underlying tension and emotional distance between them. Deeply affected (understandably) by Maria Falconetti's performance in Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc, Nana's conversation proceeds in silent film intertitles - reflecting her own suffering and innate desire to achieve greatness and escape the banality of her sordid life. The seamless camerawork following Nana as she dances uninhibitedly around the billiard room feels intoxicating, almost mesmerizing - a fleeting glimpse of the few brief moments of pure joy she has ever known. My Life to Live is a truly remarkable film: a synthesis of artistic vision and moral tale, suffused with haunting melody, the ballad of a contemporary tragedy.
Movie Review: Great Print, Great Movie, Great Godard!
Summary: 5 Stars
Wow. That's all I have to say, is wow. What an amazing film this is. Clearly, along with Breathless, Pierrot le Fou, and Weekend, this is one of Godard's best movies. To sit and watch this movie, is to realize that movies (especially the ilk Hollywood produces year after year) doesn't stimulate your mind anymore, just entertain you.
Anna Karina, as always, gives a stella performance, and like Lauren Bacall, and French actress, Stephane Audran, Catherine Deneuve, etc., she's totally impassive but has enormous inner excitement. And this is great, cause like a Bresson or Melville film, it forces you to question yourself: what in the hell is they thinking?
Why don't Hollywood raise up and stop thinking we Americans are stupid, and the only thing we're interested in is bland character development and special effects? Why doesn't an immature filmmaker like Quentin Tarantino (who is detached as Godard, but isn't poetically exuberant nor socially/politically educated as Godard) grow up and stop thinking we all want these shallow movies, that carry a comic book sensibility, but no depth? Its as though the rest of the world has grown up, and Hollywood is still limping behind, trying to catch up with the mature European cinema.
Thank God for Wong Kar-Wai (the closet thing we have to Jean-Luc Godard) who, in each film, grabs you, forces you to seat in your seat, and work the answers out, instead of spoon feeding them to you. One will hope that our MTV generation of filmmakers (Paul Thomas Anderson, Quentin Tarantino, Guy Ritchie, etc.) will soon grow up and produce films that will intellectualize your mind, instead of just entertaining you, like pornography.
And yes, this is another film that helped Tarantino create this so-called, blatantly false (hope you're reading this Roger Ebert) Tarantino-esque style that Godard created way before anyone heard of Pulp Fiction.