In 1963, Jean-Luc Godard teamed up once again with his then wife Anna Karina to produce this marvelous art film featuring highly innovative filming techniques. My Life to Live tackles deep philosophical issues while utilizing an intensity of facial close-ups previously encountered only in Passion of Joan of Arc and later used by Bergman in Persona.

Historical Background: My Life to Live (Vivre Sa Vie), made in 1963, was Godard’s fourth feature film and the first truly great one, in my opinion, following his highly acclaimed debut film A Bout de Souffle (1959), known as Breathless in America. My Life to Live became one of the seminal films of the New Wave.

The Story: The film begins with extended and stunning close-ups of the face of Nana (Anna Karina), full front, then in profile. The camera lingers, as if intent on memorizing every detail. Her face is impassive. She is beautiful but remote, sad, detached, almost vacuous. Her face reveals such a sensitivity and seductive innocence that you immediately want to love her. You look at her magnificent large eyes, which seem, at first, to offer a corridor to her soul, but you see nothing definite. Only, perhaps, a little girl who is lost and desperate. You can’t take your eyes off of her. You want to know her, to discover what is inside this beautiful persona. She reveals nothing freely.

Next we see Nana sitting on a stool in a cafeteria, talking with her husband, Paul (Andre Labarthe). We already know her intent because My Life to Live is divided into twelve scenes and each begins with a chapter title frame that briefly describes what is to follow. In this first scene, we are told, Nana wants to break up with Paul. Their conversation is presented very realistically. This couple (soon to be ex-couple) has a lot of emotional baggage – a lot of wounded feelings. They say things to hurt one another or, at least, despite hurting one another. We learn that the two of them have a son who has been put into a foster home. Nana no longer loves Paul and feels that the words they exchange have lost meaning. He belittles her ambitions and attributes their problems to his having no money. Still, they manage to break things off without sinking too deeply into angry denunciations of one another. We watch this entire discussion from behind them, seeing their faces only in the mirror behind the counter or in profile, as if we were spying on them from a nearby table.

Nana takes a job in a record store. We watch her dealing with a customer and trying to scrounge money from a coworker. Later, she returns to her boarding house to discover that she has been evicted and locked out. She tries to steal the key when the concierge turns her back, but is caught by the male assistant, put in an arm lock, and marched out to the street. She is now homeless. She goes to the theater to watch a movie – it is Dreyer’s masterpiece, Passion of Joan of Arc, a film that features magnificent and intense close-ups of the face of the lead actress, Renee Maria Falconetti, that reveal the depth of her inner torment. The camera drinks in the images of Falconetti, tears streaming down her face. It cuts to Nana, in a similar close-up shot, tears also streaming down her face. We know that she, too, feels some inner torment – if only we can discover what it is. Somehow it remains just out of reach behind the magnificence of her outer façade.

Nana is questioned at the police station. She had seen a customer at a newsstand unknowingly drop a 1000 franc note and had put her foot over it, hoping to claim it once the lady had left. The lady did walk away, but then noticed that she had lost it and had returned and stared at Nana until she returned the note out of guilt. Even then, the lady had turned Nana in to the police.

Nana is broke, jobless, and homeless. She is reduced to walking the streets and takes her first customer. She refuses to let him kiss her. She meets a friend, Yvette (Guylaine Schlumberger), at a café in the suburbs. Yvette is an experienced prostitute. Nana says to Yvette, “I think we’re always responsible for our actions. I am free.” Yvette asks if she may introduce her to Raoul (Sady Rebbot), a man at the pinball machine. Raoul wonders, before approaching Nana, if she is a lady or a tramp. A man nearby suggests, “Insult her. If she’s a tramp, she’ll get angry; if a lady, she’ll smile.” Raoul joins Nana at her table and begins, “Are you a friend of Yvette? I already know you. It was three months ago. Boulevard Saint-Germain looking at photos. Ah, why do you deny it? You parrot anything. You’re ridiculous. Why are you looking at me like that? You look stupid, and your hair looks awful.” Nana smiles and then laughs, thus proving by the earlier logic that she is, in fact, a lady. Later, Nana toys with writing an application for a job but Raoul comes by and offers that she can make more money working for him at The Champs Elysées (where Parisian hookers hang out). He asks her to give him a smile. She refuses, says she’s not in the mood to smile, looks stone-faced for about ten seconds, then breaks uncontrollably into a smile. She accepts Raoul’s offer and he explains, in a matter-of-fact monotone, the “rules.”

We see snippets of her life as a hooker. She goes through the motions, seemingly not suffering but not happy either. She goes to a pool hall with Raoul, who is meeting a man over some business. While waiting for Raoul, she encounters an intriguing young man (Peter Kassowitz) practicing pool by himself. She turns on the charm, but he ignores her and seems to want to concentrate on his pool game. She asks Raoul and his companion for a cigarette but is told to buy some downstairs. The young man exits and returns with a pack of cigarettes for her, then returns to his pool game. Nana is bored, so Raoul’s companion entertains her briefly with a pantomime routine. Later, Nana puts a coin in the jukebox and dances a soulfully uninhibited and seductive routine. We see, for the first time, her inner child revealed.

Nana sits down alone at a booth in a restaurant and becomes intrigued with an elderly man in the adjacent booth. He is reading. She asks if he’ll buy her a drink. He is a philosopher (Brice Parain, playing himself). They get into a deep philosophical conversation – well, he’s deep and she does the best she can. She’s wonders why she has trouble finding the words to say what she wants to say. He talks to her about the difference between inner life (thoughts) and interaction with others (conversation). “We balance, that’s why we pass from silence to words. We swing between the two because it’s the movement of life. From everyday life, one rises to a life we call superior, the thinking life.” He has stated the essence of Nana’s challenge and her distress – the search for her inner self. She is. at age twenty-two, only beginning to develop her interior person – her values and beliefs. What we were searching for in her eyes at the beginning of the film is also what she herself must find. The philosopher adds, “But this [inner] life presupposes one has killed the everyday too elementary life.”

Nana returns to the young man at the pool hall. He is reading poems by Poe. He reads, “The Oval Portrait”, about a painter who is obsessed with creating the perfect portrait of his wife, capturing every imaginable nuance. He spends all his time with the painting and has become so in love with it that he excludes everyone from the room as he works on it. Finally, he adds the last brush stroke, stands back to admire his masterpiece, and discovers his wife lying lifeless. [Ironically, the poem is actually read by Godard, who was effectively in the process of creating a film portrait of his wife, Anna Karina.] Nana and her young man are in love. He wants her to move in with him and to go to museums with him. She says she will tell Raoul that she is getting out of prostitution.

POSSIBLE SPOILER: SKIP TO THEMES IF YOU LIKE

Raoul, however, is not about to let one of his valuable hookers get away. He has decided to sell her to another pimp. At the exchange, however, gunfire erupts and it is Nana who is hit – from both sides. She dies on the street.

Themes: My Life to Live is a ferociously powerful and intelligent film addressing several fundamental themes of human existence. The central issue is inner self vs. persona. Nana has a powerful innate drive to escape the banality of her superficial and sordid life by discovering her inner being, but she is a late bloomer in that regard. People differ widely in the extent to which they ever develop a strong, inner core of being and how early in life that developmental process begins. In general, introverts develop their inner person sooner and, sometimes, more completely than extroverts, while, at the same time, lagging behind in development of exterior personality and interpersonal skills. It’s simply a matter of how one utilizes the bulk of one’s time. Godard’s filmmaking approach in My Life to Live makes viewers fully complicit in Nana’s search for her inner self right from the film’s opening. We stare at her gorgeous exterior, look deeply into her darting, wary eyes, and search for her inner nature even as she does.

Godard establishes this existential theme of the search for one’s inner being right from the beginning. The film opens with a quote from Montaigne, “Lend yourself to others but give yourself to yourself.” We lend ourselves to others through our outward behavior and persona and conversation. We give ourselves to ourselves by developing an interior person – a set of value and beliefs as well as a habit of inner thought and sentience. Godard continues the theme in the first scene. Paul tells Nana a story, as an aside, about something written by one of his father’s young students, “If you take away the outside of a chicken, you have the inside; if you take away the inside, you have the soul.” Whether its three layers or two is not so important. The key point is that the outside should not be confused for the inside.

The theme is further subtly developed when Nana first meets the young man at the pool hall. She tries to engage him by flashing and prancing her exterior beauty. It’s worked for her in the past; most guys will be hooked like a striper on a lure. This deep young man, however, is unimpressed. He ignores her exterior good looks but, on the other hand, he’s the only one to take note of and respond to her plea for a cigarette. He is attuned to her inner person not her outer person. She is the one who is thereby hooked. She is so excited, in fact, that a man has actually paid attention to her inner person rather than her outer beauty that she performs her dance to the juke box tune, revealing for the first time, to us and the young man, something of her inner feelings.

As a prostitute, Nana is in the business of all businesses that most capitalizes on outer person – the body and physical beauty – and most dehumanizes a person and diminishes the significance of the inner person. Hence, Nana’s profession conflicts with her search for her inner self and she begins to despair. She finds the guidance that she so desperately needs from the philosopher. He clarifies for her the difference between external behavior and inner self. He outlines for her the path necessary for development of her inner self. As a result, she returns to the young man who values her inner being and wants to help her develop it – through poetry and appreciation of art. She makes the commitment to proceed with him in that positive direction. Unfortunately, another theme of the film now comes into play.

A second important theme of My Life to Live is the one captured by the very title of the film: we are each responsible for our own actions. We are conscious creatures with volition. Nana’s understanding on this point seems pretty solid, yet it is incomplete. What she has failed to understand is that some kinds of choices that we might make freely cause us to then lose a degree of our freedom. In choosing the profession of prostitution, Nana unwittingly sacrificed a degree of her future freedom. Raoul laid out the rules for her. A prostitute cannot refuse a paying customer. She must “go with” any man who pays. What Nana did not realize was that Raoul’s rule (in his eyes) did not mean “so long as she remained a prostitute.” From his viewpoint, she had sold her freedom to him as her pimp. She made what she thought was a free choice to lead her life as she wished, but, in so doing, she sacrificed her ability to get out of the life of prostitution subsequently. As an aside, one might also note that the same kind of paradoxical loss of freedom by a choice made freely is amply illustrated in this film by the continuous smoking of most of these characters. One chooses freely to take up smoking but most smokers are then unable to later choose not to smoke. Some freely made choices have the effect of restricting our subsequent freedom of choice.

On another level, My Life to Live can be viewed as a treatise on prostitution. Godard drew on documentary reports on prostitution for his factual information. This film ably portrays the human tragedy of the profession.

Production Values: The camera technique used for this film is highly original and ingenious. Instead of behaving as cameras normally do, the camera of cinematographer Raoul Coutard behaves like a human observer. It scans and pans around the environment, stopping at interesting images, sometimes passing by and then retreating as if to further check-out an image seen fleetingly while scanning. The camera stops and stares at objects of interest – especially Nana’s face. Sometimes the camera stares pensively out the window of a restaurant at people passing by on the street. Other times it turns abruptly toward the source of an unexpected sound. It is a remarkable tactic that has the effect of placing the viewer in the film as a silent, invisible participant. In Godard’s words, the camera in this film was “not just a recording device, but a looking device."

In My Life to Live, Godard continues to use the jump-cuts that he made famous in Breathless, but to a lesser extent. Some of the shots are held for several minutes. He makes heavy use of fades and blackouts, which is facilitated by the division of the film into the twelve chapters.

Godard’s presence as a director is evident in all of his films. In some instances (e.g., A Woman is a Woman), it is an intrusive and pointless presence – but viewers either learn to accept that as a characteristic of Godard’s style or they simply turn elsewhere for their viewing pleasure. Godard is going to be Godard and he really doesn’t care what you may think. In this particular film, however, there is an appropriateness to Godard’s self-conscious style of filmmaking precisely because this is a film about the development of self-consciousness in its protagonist. The film’s style matches the film’s subject matter.

I don’t know how much of what we see of Anna Karina in this film is performance and how much is just her being who she is. Anna Karina was Godard’s wife at the time the film was made and Godard had a fascination, almost an obsession, with portraying his wife – much like the painter in Poe’s “The Oval Portrait.” Perhaps the issue of her searching for her inner self was an issue between them in their marriage. Whether it was performance or simply her actual person, Anna Karina is obviously the entire essence of this film. She is absolutely stunning as Nana.

The soundtrack for My Life to Live is outstanding, mixing ambient sound and a haunting melody by Michel Legrand. Each segment opens with the same lyrical theme song that suggests deep melancholy longing. Godard steadfastly refused to mix sound in a sound studio, other than the addition of the musical score. He believed in capturing both his images and his sounds as they were happening. In My Life to Live, this tactic contributes to the immediacy and naturalness of the film.

Bottom-Line: Susan Sontag characterized this film as “one of the most extraordinary, beautiful, and original works of art that I know of.” I have to agree. This is Godard at his best – incisive and unsentimental, technically innovative, and passionately intelligent. My Life to Live is in French with English subtitles and has a running time of 85 minutes. The Criterion DVD has no especially interesting extras.

Recommended:
Yes

Video Occasion: Good for Groups
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age