Escape is a pipe dream.
Why?
It just is.
Looking back now, after all the admiration, often verging on adoration, bestowed by critics and cinephiles on Vivre sa vie in recent years, it's easy to lose sight of the serious questions that surrounded Jean-Luc Godard's future as a filmmaker back in 1962. After the phenomenal success of Breathless, his second film Le petit soldat languished, unreleased and censored by the French government for including torture scenes (mild by today's standards) in its handling of the Algerian conflict. His third film, A Woman is a Woman, failed to meet expectations, including those of its director, even though it too is widely appreciated by Godard fans nowadays. Its wily take on popular movie musical tropes was just a bit too challenging to the mass audiences who had an easier time grappling with Breathless, or at least so they thought. Thus it was that Vivre sa vie was borne in the midst of a crisis, or crises I should probably say. For it was not only Godard's career prospects and artistic reputation that were on the line; he was also dealing with turbulence in his marriage to Anna Karina, the beautiful and charismatic Danish model and actor who caught his eye, won his heart and landed roles both of his follow-ups to Breathless. In the fall on 1961, while shooting another director's film, she contemplated leaving Godard (ten years older than her) for Jacques Perrin, an actor her own age. This threat to their marriage had predictably explosive results - Godard trashed their apartment and left, and Karina wound up in the hospital following an overdose/suicide attempt. Knowing that he had found his muse, it's quite understandable that Godard was not willing to give up easily. But the stress generated by his intense, arguably obsessive personality resulted in clashes that were no doubt fueled in equal part by Karina's own driving ambitions and insecurities. His solution, to both bring the two of them back together and to get his creative energies flowing productively again, was the pursuit of a new project in which they would closely collaborate: Vivre sa vie, literally translated as "To live her life" but more commonly understood in English as "My life to live." The off-camera volatility and corrosive dynamics that existed at the core of Godard and Karina's relationship aren't often cited in most reviews of this film that I've read (usually the film is regarded as an indicator of simply how much he loved her, glossing over the more sinister, exploitative aspects of his influence), in this case I find it practically impossible to view the film without interpreting it through the filter that Godard himself proposes, that of a parallel between the life that he and Karina were living together and the pimp/prostitute entanglements enacted on screen. It's a dynamic that will run throughout the course of the iconic 1960s masterpieces that the two of them would go on to produce together, but Vivre sa vie may indeed serve as the template for all that is to follow.
Where Godard relied upon the fresh but established star power of Jean-Claude Brialy and Jean-Paul Belmondo to handsomely frame his wife and would-be star in A Woman is a Woman, Vivre sa vie was designed from its earliest conception as Anna's vehicle, a film in which she would not be overshadowed by any other performer. Instead, she is followed from start to finish as Godard records her slide from aspiring theatrical performer into the life of a Parisian prostitute. The story is presented in twelve distinct chapters, or tableaux as they're referred to in the opening credits, with brief descriptive intertitles separating each section, outlining details of what occurs in that part of the movie. Given the unique framework of the film and the abundance of things I have to say about it, I'm going to partition my review similarly, offering a few notes I took on each tableau.
I.
The opening credits are calm and constrained, compared to Godard's typical manner of introducing his films. Three static shots of Anna Karina's character Nana move from a left profile to a frontal close-up to a right profile. They appear to be the same pose, just filmed from the respective angles by different cameras, with text emblazoned over her image and a brief 10 bar musical theme that repeats throughout the film. The sequence serves as a stage-setter for the unusual and provocative decision to position the camera behind Nana and her estranged husband Paul as they discuss their marital breakdown while seated at a lunch counter. Their faces are slightly visible, in soft focus mirror images behind the waiter pouring coffee and attending to customers. Their conversation informs us of crucial details - Nana is a mother but is leaving their infant child and Paul behind to pursue a modeling/acting career. She feels unloved by Paul, disappointed that he's not more capable of making her feel special. Maybe he just has a hard time figuring out how to handle her narcissism. As beautiful (hence, lovable) as most viewers find Nana, she's undoubtedly full of herself, convinced that she's capable and deserving of more than what her life has given her so far. In her comments to her husband, Nana sometimes recites the lines, trying out different inflections, imagining herself on stage, auditioning, in performance. Paul thinks she's dumping him because of the money - the easy fallback excuse for relationally handicapped men from time immemorial. Nana suggests a pinball match to distract them from the unpleasant heaviness.
Text: The bird, stripped of its outside, reveals its inside, and within that inside, we locate its soul.
Angle: From behind.
II.
In the absence of any income from the husband she's abandoned, Nana works as a clerk in the Pathe'-Marconi record store in the heart of Paris. She blithely strolls from rack to rack, retrieving titles requested by customers and hitting up her co-workers for a short term loan of 2000 francs. Tedium. Time passes, joylessly. Nana is not feeling special. Life is wasting away.
Text: Romantic pulp fiction. Too much logic. No broken heart, no more struggle to live. No masking one's defeat. An elegant way of breaking this deadlock, as life outside the window, life on the street continuously rolls by.
Angle: Fixed level, panning/tracking combination.
III.
Nana's workday is now over and we see her do two double-takes as she tries to elude her landlady and make a dash for her apartment. She's locked out though, rent's overdue. Now physically homeless, her detachment from the ordinary trappings of bourgeois life becomes more tangible and permanent. She refuses another session with Paul, choosing instead to go see a movie - Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc, spelled out in neon letters. Sitting in darkness, a silent theater, the arm of an uncomprehending stranger draping over her shoulder, Nana sits in rapt, tormented ecstasy, identifying with the doomed peasant girl, or rather, the actress on the screen - one and the same. Through Nana's reflective, glistening tears, Godard spreads the contagion of his immersive cinephilia to souls vulnerable to perceiving, if they only look long and deep enough, the same unfathomable mysteries that have commanded his gaze for so many hours of life. A new way to watch movies.
But with the program concluded and her communion with the spirit of Joan now established, Nana has other late night business to attend to. Ditching her date, meeting a photographer, she implicitly understands and accepts his proposition. Another step toward her destiny, a martyrdom she knows deep down awaits.
Text: The composite sheet, a folded poster of pretty women in various stages of nudity, the ticket to getting a look for possible movie parts. I'm shy about undressing. Only a little, what can it hurt? Can you lend me 2000 francs?
Angle: Overhead, alongside, omniscient, Gods-eye view.
IV.
The police station, where we learn Nana's last name and her German background. She's been reported by a woman for petty theft, after she caught Nana trying to conceal under her shoe some money the woman dropped on the sidewalk. Though Nana gave the money back when confronted, charges are still filed. Cruel, unfair. Nana finds herself outside the law, though not without sympathy from the large man interviewing her from behind the large typewriter.
Text: The police report, generated by the testimony of the crime victim, the arresting officer, and the accused. What are you going to do? I don't know. I... is someone else. Profile. Theme. Decision.
Angle: Tight close-up. Interrogatory.
V.
A stroll on the boulevard, Nana is propositioned by her first paying customer. How about it? Yes. Into a room, rented by the hour, curtains drawn, soap, towel, ashtray, cash withdrawn from pocket. A fumbling negotiation, an awkward evasion of lips. Momentary panic. It will get easier.
Text: Road signs, marquees, graffiti. Lucas Service. Spartacus poster. Le Meillot (Bikini) Palace, Standing All Day.
Angle: Street view.
VI.
At a cafe in the suburbs, a chance meeting between Nana and her friend Yvette leads to conversation as they catch up after some months without contact, and incidentally to an introduction to Raoul, the pimp who will turn Nana into a professional. Nana professes her responsibility, naive and unvarnished, plain and simple. for all the actions of her life - absolving all others from blame, but longing, almost secretly (so secretly that she can hardly admit it to herself) for the kind of uncomplicated romance she hears from the jukebox song and symbolized by the unassuming couple in the booth across from her. Ah, if only.
Another pinball game. Raoul takes his leave of the pastime, puts Nana to the test, overwhelms her by his insulting strategy, finds her a suitable recruit. The ledger, the gunshots, the bloodied face straggles in. Nana runs away.
Text: Raoul's notebook:tricks turned, day of the week, rooms rented. The life, boiled down to its quantifiable transactions.
Angle: Eavesdropping, conversational, curious, inquisitive.
VII.
The letter. Nana solicits employment at a brothel, cataloguing her attributes, ready to leave town and start fresh if that's what it takes to extricate herself from the present dilemma. A Godardian sleight-of-hand "self-measurement" trick cutely distracts us from realizing that the backdrop behind her is not a view through an elevated window, but rather just a large wallpaper image of the heart of Paris. The camera slides on its tracks to show Nana's face, or obscure it, as she coaxes flattery from Raoul, the two of them each working the other over for what they perceive to be maximum advantage. When she hears Raoul's compliments about the "goodness" he sees in her, she brushes them off - that's not what she's looking to hear. What she mainly wants to know is, does he see her as special in any way? He glides around a direct reply, but promises enough money to make it worth her while. The coaxing continues. Nana, almost helplessly but also responsibly, gives Raoul and us a heartbreaking smile.
A kiss and a shared puff of smoke seal the devil's bargain. Earlier in the conversation, Anna mentioned that she didn't expect a "Catholic" answer, but what follows is nothing less than a catechism on how the prostitution trade work, as the night lights of the Champs-Elysees fade to black.
Text: The letter, never sent.
Angle: Subtle, evasive, trompe l'oeil.
VIII.
A succession of moments offering details of the life that Nana has chosen to live: entries, exits, exchanges, exhalations. Pushes, pulls, twists, turns - touches, repetitions, transactions, explanations. A blur, swiftly proceeding, impressions that pass quickly, only the money and the memories remain.
Text: The extended quotation from Marcel Secotte's book, Ou en est la prostitution (included as a supplement in the Criterion edition of Vivre sa vie) serves as the entire spoken script for this tableau.
Angle: Direct, documentary. Quick cuts, plain edits. No loitering please, we have a business to run here.
IX.
Nana tags along while Raoul attends to financial matters, but the film (and its audience) requires some entertainment, so Godard generously provides a bit of variety - pantomime, music, dancing... allowing his actors to show off their talents and lift the mood. The bored Nana suddenly transforms into Anna Karina, shaking her lacy blouse, twirling her skirt, kicking and flirting and even working a pole.
Overflowing with charm, a reminder that unlike the reality of sex trafficking in other environments, Nana's trade is not all that rough.
Text: the boogie woogie jukebox tune, interpreted in dance by Nana/Anna.
Angle: Kinetic, mobile, seductive.
X.
Nana's hour with Dimitri, one transaction isolated to give us a prolonged view of her at work. Dimitri requests a two-on-one, which sends Nana on a hunt for one of her peers who might happen to be available at the moment. Doors opened, rooms peeped into, statuesque nudes, a recruit is found, but now Nana seems unnecessary. She smokes off the snub, living her life.
Text: The bill-plastered wall that Nana stands in front of, awaiting her next trick. Posters advertise Eva-Marie Saint in Exodus, Danny Kaye in On the Double and Paul Newman in The Hustler.
Angle: Voyeuristic, slightly embarrassed, averted glances, apologetic.
XI.
Nana walks the boulevard in velvet and fur, arrives at her destination, a restaurant, the incarnation of "smoking hot." Aimlessly distracted, she hits up a stranger, asks him to buy her a drink. He turns out to be a cordial old philosopher, Brice Parain, who's more than willing to answer her questions and pose a few of his own. He speaks about the doom we seal for ourselves when we first become self-conscious, aware of our own thoughts, of our need to communicate, whether through speaking or writing, and the irresolvable problems we create for ourselves by using words to express what we find meaningful. One learns to speak well only when one has renounced life for awhile... There's a kind of ascetic rule that stops one from speaking well until one sees life with detachment. It's no accident that Parain is the man sitting in the booth next to Nana, given carte blanche to articulate his insights at length, asked just the right questions by his newfound friend that allow him to open up. He's there at Godard's invitation, enacting Vivre sa vie's boldest and clearest claim to mark a new birth of French intellectual cinema, what Truffaut had identified as the "Delluc branch," with Michelangelo Antonioni in position as its most current figurehead. As Parain spins out his word salad, worthy of engagement for those with sufficient patience, Nana does her best to keep up, though one can't help but wonder how much of her share of the dialogue is supplied by JLG himself. Finally she has to derail the train of thought with another piercing glance into the heart of the lens, into the hearts of those would would happily pay an exorbitant price to be sitting with her there in that booth, smoking Gauloises, wondering what's about to happen next.
Text: Parain's discourse, interpreted by Nana's questions and innate curiosity.
Angle: Discursive, dialectic, cross-examination.
XII.
The longest tableau of the twelve, this one could have been divided up into smaller segments as it features more scene changes than the others. Godard seems to have fixed upon the number 12, a reduction from his original concept of "approximately twenty episodes" - probably just more manageable. The young man from the pool hall returns, probably at Nana's invitation, where he passes some time reading a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. The voice we hear is Godard's, the director exercising his prerogative to insert himself in this most personal of films. Has he mastered his own detachment to the point that he's now ready to speak, or is it simply that he cannot resist his own impulse? Never mind. The words he adds to the soundtrack communicate truth of a certain sort, a prophecy foretold by the juxtaposition of Nana/Anna's face with a small portrait of Elizabeth Taylor affixed to the wall behind her. The story narrates the incident of a painter giving the verisimilitude of life to his wife's portrait through careful labors that incidentally drain away her energies as he focuses on the surface and neglects to interact with her being. It concludes on a gloomy silent note.
The theme strikes up again as we read the dialogue between Young Man and Nana, watching them exchange happy embraces. They envision a life together than neither of them will ever live.
Text: Poe's The Oval Portrait.
Angle: Multiple recapitulations of interiors and exteriors we've seen throughout the film, an omnibus of views, the end of a life flashed before our eyes.
The final chapter of Nana's story is, among other things, but one fissure in the split that, according to Godard, began with the making of this film that was expressly undertaken to draw them back together and repair the damage of a previous crisis. The original scenario drawn up by Godard, and pitched to Karina, was that after leaving the custody of Raoul, Nana would move in with her new boyfriend and continue offering her services as a call girl more independently, in middle class comforts. By revising the ending to one in which Nana is callously traded off by Raoul to another pimp, then shot and left for dead in the street after a dispute erupts between the traffickers, Godard inadvertently triggered another suicidal gesture by Karina, her exclamation of protest against what she considered a deliberate derailing of her ambitions to become a more traditional and popular movie star. Unwilling or simply unable to stop the production in its tracks, Nana's desperate plea, "No! Don't shoot me!" in the moment before she's gunned down by each of the men claiming ownership of her has more ring of truth to it than the usual bit of tragic movie dialog. As a formal conclusion to the film that Godard wanted to make, I cannot levy a serious complaint or charge him with an error in wrapping it up that way. But as a dramatic device, the killing of Nana is a cheap throwaway, a gratuitously overbearing moralistic gesture that says to me, more than anything else, than Godard still had some growing up to do on the interpersonal side of his life. Nana/Anna deserved better.
Next: Carnival of Souls