Vivre Sa Vie

Vivre Sa Vie

Jean-Luc Godard's third feature film, midway between landmark debut Breathless and Bande à part, Vivre Sa Vie is equal parts character study and neorealist documentary, showcasing protagonist Nana's (Godard's then-wife, Anna Karina) transition into prostitution. It's no Belle de Jour, forsaking that fellow French import's glamorous gangsterdom for a grittier depiction, but it's not a heavy-handed downer either: Nana's decision to start tricking is of the same disaffected manner with which she shrugs off a lover or drearily wades through her record store job – begrudgingly, but always with the expectation there's something new lying in wait.

A yearning for connection informs the entire film, starting with its opening shot framing Nana and her lover from behind, their faces semireflected in a bar mirror almost as an afterthought. It's a trope repeated several times throughout the film, along with other Brechtian tricks like jump cuts and inter-titles breaking up the action (stylistic tics since widely adapted, notably in the Godard-honoring works of Tarantino). Notwithstanding the film's arguable emotional apex – a hushed, protracted scene in a cinema, in which tears spill out Nana's saucer eyes during Dreyer's 1928 silent La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc, Godard simultaneously highlighting the artifice and emotional power of film – connections emerge late in the film. The first, a fascinatingly flat recital of legal, financial, and medical issues of prostitution – informed, the extras-packed Criterion disc informs us, by the nonfiction book Où en est la prostitution – highlights the 9-to-5 drudgery of the job. The other, an "accidental" philosophical discussion between Nana and a cafe rhapsodizer (French philosopher Brice Parain) emphasizes the struggle of communication and connection, but makes it clear that there really is no other option. It's a bittersweet coda to the film, which ends abruptly in a Godardian flash of random violence.

As a vanguard of the French New Wave, Godard's work is a gold mine of academic film lit fodder. But despite his philosophical trappings and distancing devices – abruptly halted musical overtures, and stares headlong into the camera, and, in that wonderful cinema scene, silence – the generous, forgiving humanity of Vivre Sa Vie still beats through. It's most apparent in Nana's famous pool hall dance: saucy, haunting, a little silly, and altogether real. In Vivre Sa Vie, which translates as "Living Her Life," it's clear our Nana did live hers, although as a caution of the perils of the unexamined life.