rdoyle29 Godard's third feature film tells the story of Nana (Anna Karina) in 12 chapters. Nana leaves her husband, and is desperate for money. She gradually descends into a life of prostitution. This sounds like a dark bit of social realism, and while it has some aspects of that, this is really a film infused with Godard's early love of cinema. He strains against the limits of acceptability, trying things because he can. He shoots dialogue scenes from behind the speakers's heads, he pans his camera to look at seemingly irrelevant things, his cops up the score and drops snippets in at unpredictable moments. I know this makes the film sound insufferably pretentious, but this is not that Godard ... not yet. This film has joyous energy and I love it.

adrin-65078 See Adrin Neatrour crits at www.crinklecut.co.uk After the opening title sequence Godard's Vivre sa vie cuts to a long durational close shot in which the camera, tracks between a couple who are seated beside each other on bar stools at the counter of a café. They are talking about the nature of their relationship and its break up. As the camera tracks back and forth across the space between them, only one of them is ever in frame, and the shot set up is from behind, so that as they talk, we see only the back of a head.The what is said by this shot is in itself both witty and analytic. It allows the camera to express the opening concepts of alienation, separation within a context of movement. The wit lies in emotionally de-saturating the dialogue from faciality as Nana and her ex talk about the failure of their relationship her beef about his attempts to control her and his economic angle as Nana's ex signs off with the observation that as a musician, Nana is leaving him because he is poor. The ultimate deficiency in a culture based on consumption rather than production.With Anna K playing the role of Nana Godard's film is in content, a modernist rephrasing of Zola's eponymous novel charting the transformation of a young operetta star into a high class prostitute, whose allure and cold blooded exploitation of her sexuality destroy all the men who become infatuated with her.The power of Nana's presence is described by Zola as a psychic emanation that irresistibly attracts male desire. Godard's transposes elements of the Zola story. But because this is now an image driven culture, his Nana in the form of Karina, exists as an object of desire for the camera. It is Godard's camera that loves her image embraces and devours her. When Nana leaves her job in the record shop and takes up prostitution, her male clients barely seem to notice her. Throughout the film the men are self absorbed, as if playing pinball or engaging in masturbation, they barely notice Nana. She is simply someone they pay. Unlike their wives or girlfriends they have to shell out coin.The ethos of cool detachment pervades Vivre sa vie. The guys all wear coats turned up at the collar as they move through a world of artefacts, cafes, and automobiles. The women, immaculately coiffed and kitted out with couture outfits and shoes. It is a world without emotion, the world of advertising, where there are settings backdrops and product display.But Godard fixes his movies with pure concept. To oppose Nana's image defined world he uses a number of cinematic devices, simply interpolated that he cuts into the body of the film. Like the chapter headings they comprise a breaking up of flow, an opening up different idea spectra about what we are seeing.The inter cutting of a section of Dreyer's The Passion of Jean d'Arc. Godard uses a scene with Artaud, theoretician of the theatre of cruelty who plays the monk, Massieu questioning Falconetti's Jeanne. The Material grilling the Spiritual. A section of Edgar Allen Poe, the master of unnameable dread (uncool) is read on camera and later during one of Nana's assignations with a client, the results of the statistical survey of Parisian prostitution are intoned as voice over.There are two more extraordinary interpolations inserted of the body of the film. The scene where a guy mimes the process of a little boy blowing up a balloon. As performance it is intense funny and suddenly in its intensity and power feels like a transposition of male ejaculation. A hyper parody of in-existent sexuality. In a nondescript section of a cafe, Nana and a Philosopher talk about life specifically focusing on 'love' (uncool) at the end of their discussion. Unlike the tracking two shot at the front of the movie, this is shot full face with and pans from Nana to the Philosopher, with the Philosopher finally concluding, in response to Nana's question that love is real "…on condition it is true." In a culture of image how to find what is true and be able to distinguish it from what is not true? In a world of mirrors….Eddie Constantine appears as a spectre throughout Vivre sa vie. His presence as an image inside Nana's head a constant source of reference. And it is almost as if he were in the film, and if you squint your eyes you may see him.With Godard, film doesn't just think, it lives and breaths a world of unseen possibilities .

Steve Pulaski During the 1960's, Jean-Luc Godard made fifteen feature-length pictures that owed themselves to the French New Wave movement, where young, "reckless" filmmakers made audacious attempts to defy the conventions of mainstream French cinema. Godard among many others decided to figuratively illustrate the book of common cinematic conventions and proceed to rip them up before concocting their own rebellious form of filmmaking, which, overall, seemed to want to hit the bases of reality's imperfections, coldness in story and characters, violence, and the physical and metaphorical chaos of modern society.Some of the above themes are what Godard uses to write and direct Vivre Sa Vie, a thought-provoking and consistently fascinating mood-piece, focusing on a woman by the name of Nana, played by the beautiful Anna Karina. Nana is a young Parisian twentysomething, aimlessly drifting through life after she leaves the safe but relatively unremarkable confines of her homelife, which involved a husband and a child. She's heavily strapped for cash, with her job as a shopgirl providing for what little income she already has, and soon realizes that leading a viable life on so little is just not a reality.She decides to take up life as a prostitute, which she'll earn better money doing instead of the day-in-and-day-out drudgery of being a shopgirl. She becomes the employee of Raoul (Sady Rebbot), your average pimp who takes advantage of Nana's youngness and gorgeous looks in order to turn a profit.Throughout the entire film, Godard conducts Vivre Sa Vie with pure, uneasy coldness, staging the picture into twelve separate chapters ("tableaus"). Each chapter, marked by a descriptive title-card, gives insight into Nan's particular stage in life at that moment in time and provides for a neatly-punctual little narrative that Godard smoothly orchestrates.Vivre Sa Vie ("My Life to Live" in English) seems like a film that would be made in present times because of its documentary-style filmmaking (more formerly known as "cinéma vérité"). More informally, the film bears a slice-of-life realism to it that is just beginning to gain considerable momentum in American cinema and only proves that Godard was ahead of his time, making a film like this in 1962.With the film's polished and clear videography, Godard strayed away from the hand-held-camera techniques of his earlier films such as Breathless and his final New Wave picture of the 1960's, Weekend. Godard uses what is known as a Mitchell camera to capture his carefully-framed and elegant shots that point where few cameras have pointed before. Godard continues to defy normalcy by pointing the camera at places uncommon, such as the back of Nana's head while she's speaking in conversation, or allowing the camera to hold in place during one long shot. Godard's camera techniques are aplenty and his ambition is most often met with an unexpected and very pleasant success.Furthermore, Godard knows how to write meaningful, sometimes philosophical dialog that finds ways to be hugely relevant and even deeply-contemplative. Consider the scene where Raoul tells Nana the value of a prostitute, detailing her job description and her role as a woman without many rights and robbed of her individuality and her humanity. She's a piece of meat for lonely men searching for a quick sexual fix that often finds ways to be completely unsexual and unromantic. Raoul illustrates this idea of what it means to be a prostitute in the coldest, yet most fitting way possible.Another conversation comes near the end, where Nana meets a random soul in a diner and strikes up a conversation. The man turns out to be a deeply thoughtful and wise man who seems to be looking for simple human companionship. Him and Nana have a delightfully philosophical conversation, showing that even two people who've never met one in another in their life possess the ability to connect with each other on an unexpected personal level, fulfilling one another in ways they never found foreseeable.Make no mistake, however, that Vivre Sa Vie is a cold and often detaching film that leaves little room for connecting with the characters in any way. After viewing four Godard films, three of which from the French New Wave, detachment seems to be an overarching theme for reasons I'm not sure I can adequately explain. Godard seems unable to allow his characters to be more than just unmoving littler pawns in his cinematic game. Despite giving Nana several traits and some debatable motives, even she has her own coldness to her being. At this point, I'm waiting for the film where instead of pushing us about a foot away from the film, Godard grabs us in and gives us a setting, an event, or a more fleshed out character to connect with.Starring: Anna Karina and Sady Rebbot. Directed by: Jean-Luc Godard.

Michael_Elliott Vivre Sa Vie (1962)*** (out of 4) Jean-Luc Godard's tale of a young woman named Nana (Anna Karina) who slowly finds her desperate situation in life turning her towards prostitution to make some money. Once you see Godard's name then you know we're not going to get a straight story of a woman entertaining prostitution. Instead, the film is told in twelve chapters that really play out more like vignettes than anything else but I think this actually helps the film in a few ways. I've been quite critical with the director and several of his films but I think that style of his really doesn't go over-the-top here and for the most part it works. This is especially true in the first couple chapters where we see the woman's desperate situation and how she keeps waiting for a break to happen but of course it never comes. Godard's style of storytelling also works beautifully during a sequence where the woman is given all the information and rules about being a prostitute. This sequence here is perhaps one of my favorites from any Godard film I've seen up to this point. With that said, I found the final two chapters to be rather boring and to me they simply didn't fit in with the rest of the movie. I don't mind how the picture ended but chapter eleven takes place in a restaurant and has the woman talking to an older man. I'm sure some will get something out of this conversation but it just left me flat. I think the best thing working here is the performance of Karina who is simply divine in the lead role. It's hard to work your way through the director's style but Karina makes for a very believable role and actually makes you care about this woman and the trouble she's in. VIVRE SA VIE isn't something that I found to be a masterpiece but it is one of the better films I've seen from Godard.