Anna Karina

My Life to Live (1962)

André Crous

Sweet, tragic and playful, My Life to Live is almost entirely watchable despite its director’s gratuitous attempts at audiovisual contrivances.

Vivre sa vieFrance
4*

Director:
Jean-Luc Godard
Screenwriter:
Jean-Luc Godard
Director of Photography:
Raoul Coutard

Running time: 85 minutes

Original title: Vivre sa vie : film en douze tableaux

A mildly interesting concept that Jean-Luc Godard developed with much less pretension in his first-ever short film, A Flirtatious Woman, the notion of a woman deciding to try her hand at the oldest profession in the world is the narrative hook of My Life to Live. But as happens so often with the director’s feature films, he frequently makes it all about himself and his need to experiment rather than letting us into his characters’ heads and hearts. This time around, the story is fragmented into 12 parts (or “tableaux”, according to the French title), all of which have detailed but generally unhelpful chapter headings and do their best to alienate us from the action – not without success.

Although he does have one or two enjoyable surprises up his sleeve, Godard starts his film off with yet another futile attempt to perform cinematic alchemy. In the opening scene, Nana and her husband, Paul, are seated at the bar inside a café, discussing their marital problems. But we don’t see their faces. Mostly, we only see the backs of their heads. In the mirror across from them, we can almost make out the reflection of Nana’s face – it is Anna Karina. Nana and Paul sit next to each other but don’t share a frame. Each of them speaks in a one-shot, and whenever there is a cut, the ambient sound on the soundtrack changes abruptly. The conversation is not particularly volatile, but these rough transitions and their lack of elegance underscore the emotional incongruence between the two characters. Godard later repeats his trick of showing the backs of people’s heads while they speak, but he is fairly inconsistent in his approach.

Nana is an actress and hoping to make it big soon. Sadly for her, the big time hasn’t called yet, and she’s quickly running out of money. Without a husband and seemingly disinterested in her own child, she cuts loose and goes on dates. Maybe she will find a husband soon. One date takes her to the cinema, where we observe her for two full minutes watching part of Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc and shedding a few tears over Falconetti’s angst-ridden performance. She is clearly moved, perhaps a little too much, but the direct comparison to Falconetti seems preposterous.

Soon enough, she starts walking the streets and almost immediately finds her calling before realising that one of her friends has a similar story, and she soon finds herself a pimp. Godard initiates us and Nana into the world of prostitution in his typically unconventional but surprisingly comical way. In voice-over, Nana asks specific questions about how a prostitute is expected to behave and what the law says about this activity. In response, Godard provides all the answers at length and often in dense legalese that unexpectedly turns this simple question-and-answer format into a hilarious kind of catechism.

As happens so often with Godard’s films starring Anna Karina, we are left scratching our heads about the origins of the main character. While Nana has a very suggestive surname (the Germanic “Kleinfrankenheim”) and was born in the Moselle department in the east of France, she speaks French with a heavy accent (Karina is Danish) and even misspells “l’adresse” in a letter as “la dresse”. Either the character is a foreigner or she is not very intelligent. But she sure is a lot of fun.

The indisputable highlight of My Life to Live – and easily among the most enjoyable scenes Godard ever filmed – happens around a pool table. Nana’s pimp is speaking to a business partner, and a young man is playing pool. Nana is bored and looking for a distraction. She finds the jukebox, puts a coin in and lets Michel Legrand’s “Swing! Swing! Swing!” take over the soundtrack before she starts dancing. Occasionally, the camera awkwardly takes her perspective, but most of the time, we just watch her dance enthusiastically on her own. She is enchanting, and the scene is even more entertaining than her equally famous dance (with Sami Frey and Claude Brasseur) in Band of Outsiders two years later. 

The penultimate tableau seems entirely out of place. Out of nowhere, Godard intervenes to dub the voice of actor Peter Kassovitz, the same young man who was playing pool in the paragraph above. The personal reason appears to be so that Godard can speak directly to Karina, although it is disappointing that Karina (or her character, Nana) doesn’t get the opportunity to respond while breaking the fourth wall. Godard doesn’t say outright that being an actress is like being a prostitute, but he certainly leaves enough hints for us to draw that conclusion. By extension, of course, Godard is a pimp who asks us for money to spend time in her company, but this logical extension of his ill-elaborated views gets no screen time. The film then turns turns silent, complete with subtitles, although no one would mistake this for Dreyer’s classic.

My Life to Live has quite a strong storyline for a Godard film, and despite the director’s attempts to go against the grain of traditional cinema, we easily share this little adventure with his lead character. By breaking the film up into pieces and disassembling the pieces in front of our eyes, My Life to Live follows in the footsteps of A Woman is a Woman, but this time around the overarching narrative is much more appealing, and that scene around the pool table gives the viewer a high she will take days to shake.

Band of Outsiders (1964)

André Crous

Jean-Luc Godard’s Band of Outsiders is a rather shallow heist movie that nonetheless keeps our interest thanks to its mostly conventional character, its central tension and at least two delightful scenes of unbridled joy. 

Bande à partFrance
3.5*

Director:
Jean-Luc Godard
Screenwriter:
Jean-Luc Godard
Director of Photography:
Raoul Coutard

Running time: 95 minutes

Original title: Bande à part

Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the crime [sic]. In Band of Outsiders, two guys and a girl they both pine for attempt to steal a cupboard full of money with no real preparation to speak of. Usually, the movies get away with pretending that anyone can be a supercriminal, but Godard shows, in his usual light-hearted way, how deceptive such (and other) representations can be.

In what may be one of the director’s most conventional storylines, the film follows two best friends, Franz and Arthur, who both take a fancy to a girl in their English class, Odile. As usual with early Godard, Anna Karina plays Odile, a wide-eyed girl with a hint of a foreign accent but whose origins are never made explicit. Here, she comes close to being a timid damsel in distress who makes the mistake of mentioning to the boys that her uncle is hiding a stash of money in his cupboard. Despite her initial trepidation, she soon relents and joins in hatching a plan to steal what could easily amount to millions of francs.

But instead of spending time planning their first heist, the trio of more or less first-time criminals has too much fun, albeit frequently to the viewer’s amusement since the plot is so thin. “We’ll make a plan!” Arthur tells Odile. “A plan?” asks Odile, suddenly looking straight at the camera. “Why?” This is one of the multiple strategies that the director deploys to destabilise the conventional grammar of film, with varying degrees of success. It is a Godard production, after all.

First, he is the narrator, conveying a few remarks with his trademark lisp and complete lack of emotion. While some of these observations are literary devices and unnecessary (e.g. he describes the state of mind of his characters), others are playful and short enough to be effective (e.g. when, 10 minutes into the film, he briefly recaps the first few scenes for those members of the audience who arrived late to the screening). Second, he cuts the music on the soundtrack while keeping other diegetic sounds and inserts his own thoughts on the voice-over. And third, he removes all sound for a “moment of silence”, which shows how a simple gimmick (like the black page in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy) can go a long way. But he also goes over the top with his opening credits by replacing the writer-director attribution with a megalomaniacal “JEANLUC CINÉMA GODARD” credit. *groan*

In the English class, which somehow has a teacher who only reads to her students in French, the work being studied is Romeo and Juliet – specifically, the scene where Juliet decides to take her own life after finding her lover poisoned and dead. As with his previous film, Contempt, Godard seems to signal very clearly right at the start where his film is ultimately headed. In Contempt, he sought to compare his characters to the mythical couple of Ulysses and Penelope (with him, presumably, taking the role of Homer). Here, he appears to see himself through Bard-tinted glasses, although as the narrator, he also pretends to be the writer of a pulp novel, with this being one in a series of tales.

But despite its literary aspirations and its alienation devices, like when the characters break the fourth wall, the people we see here are all surprisingly human. The moments we spend with them are full of tenderness and timidity, giddiness and uncertainty, joyousness and spontaneity. Arguably the film’s most famous scene, closely related to Karina’s equally affecting performance in a bar in My Life to Live, has Odile, Franz and Arthur gleefully dance the Madison in an unbroken take over nearly four minutes.

For the most part, however, despite bursts of unbridled joy that include the threesome running through the Louvre and upsetting the guardians of classical art along the way, Band of Outsiders never tries to go deeper than the surface. The relationships between all three characters and, in some cases, their families, go wholly undeveloped. We don’t even see Odile’s uncle, the target of the heist, until one of the final scenes, and the ending itself is protracted and weak. Moreover, the multitude of literary references, from Arthur’s surname being Rimbaud to Franz reading an extraordinarily pointless story by André Breton in full while they’re out driving, will almost certainly lead to eye-rolls from the audience.

But for those who generally find Godard’s style off-putting and self-indulgent, the restraint and adherence to conventional storytelling he shows here, while still far from smooth, will be a pleasant surprise to most viewers.

A Woman is a Woman (1961)

André Crous

A harbinger of Godard’s future preoccupation with the artifice of most cinematic productions, A Woman is a Woman is an experiment in sight and sound rather than a fully formed work of entertainment.

A Woman Is a WomanFrance
2.5*

Director:
Jean-Luc Godard
Screenwriter:
Jean-Luc Godard
Director of Photography:
Raoul Coutard

Running time: 85 minutes

Original title: Une femme est une femme

A Woman is a Woman was Jean-Luc Godard’s first feature film in colour, his second to be released and his third overall. With its seemingly continuous focus on the artifice in and of movies, it also marked a significant departure from cinematic conventions – even for the man whose Breathless had popularised the jump cut.

Using its trailer-like opening credits to promote itself as not only a fiction, a sort of fairy tale (the first words we see onscreen are “IL ÉTAIT UNE FOIS”, Once upon a time), but also a “French comedy” and a “theatrical musical” that is “sentimental”. All of this happens in screen-sized capital letters. The words are in red, white and blue, France’s national colours, and for some odd reason, we even get a reference to Bastille Day when “14 July” fills the screen.

When someone offscreen shouts “lights, camera, action!”, we are further alienated from the action by being reminded that we are watching a staged production. There is a constant siren blaring to remind us this is all fake, and Godard uses many a tool to this end. Why he does this is anyone’s guess because he certainly doesn’t have a story to fall back on.

Alright, that is not entirely accurate. The film is about Angela, a young woman with a strange accent (played by Danish-born Anna Karina) who absolutely wants to get pregnant. The guy she lives with, Émile (a dashing-as-ever-despite-the-sad-puppy-eyes Jean-Claude Brialy), says they can have a child as soon as they get married. But he’s in no rush to get there.

Meanwhile, Angela, who works at a strip club of some kind (during the girls’ performances, all the men in the audience sit expressionless at tables very far apart – social distancing before it was a thing), decides she will grab the bull by the horns. The bull is a friend called Alfred Lubitsch, a portmanteau presumably taken from directors Alfred Hitchcock and Ernst Lubitsch, neither of whom would have dreamt of making as dreadful a film as this one.

There is some light-hearted discussion among the three, a pout, a shout and finally, a laid-back consensus to consummate as widely as possible. But how Godard decides to mount his paper-thin story is frustrating because his approach seems so arbitrary.

Sound and image are frequently decoupled, at least insofar as we expect them to be continuous. The soundtrack is filled with bits and pieces of music and ambient sound that start and stop again and again at the discretion of the director. When Angela sings at the club, not only does she break the fourth wall, but the accompanying piano music (played by someone other than the pianist, because he sits with his arms folded) disappears every time she opens her mouth. It is a gentle destruction of audio-visual conventions for no apparent reason other than artistic masturbation.

The assault on film grammar starts with the very first cut, which jumps across the 180-degree line. At the strip club, this cut (not quite a jump cut, rather a faux raccord that pretends space and time are respected even as they clearly are not) raises its head again, albeit more playfully, as the girls change their wardrobes by simply walking through a curtain.

The underscoring of the artifice continues unabated as all three characters look into the camera at various points, often to comment on the proceedings. During a particularly dramatic domestic scene, Angela and Émile even bow to the audience (the camera) mid-quarrel. But things really start to fall apart when Godard introduces the “real world” into his fake film, even when this real world is connected to film.

For example, the Belmondo character says he doesn’t want to miss the broadcast of Breathless on the television, in which Belmondo had played the lead. At the strip club, someone exclaims that film’s climactic phrase, “c’est dégueulasse”, on the loudspeakers. And later, Belmondo runs into Jeanne Moreau playing herself, and he asks how it is going with Jules et Jim, the film she was then shooting with François Truffaut.

All of these bits are ornaments that, at best, are not integrated into the flow of the narrative and, at worst, do not belong in the film at all. The whole thing feels like an experiment gone wrong, despite the steady, measured presence of Brialy and the comfortable rebellion of Belmondo. Unlike many of her other performances, Karina’s character here is a drag and the film’s prime exhibit of the lack of depth it gives its characters.

Actions are mostly relegated to physical theatre. At one point, Karina is frying an egg. She flips it into the air, then proceeds to leave the kitchen with the empty frying pan, answers the phone in the next room, tells the other side to wait a moment, returns to the kitchen and catches the egg with the pan at exactly the right moment. The film, especially the scenes inside the flat, feels incredibly staged, but to what end? Just to remind us that we are not watching reality?

While looking half-embarrassedly into the camera, Brialy is forced to say the words, “Is this a tragedy or a comedy? Whatever, it’s a masterpiece.” A masterpiece this is not. It is a play filmed with a minuscule cast, bright lights, colourful dresses and long takes, but with frivolous audio gimmicks (including sometimes playing the music on the soundtrack so loudly the actors’ dialogue is barely intelligible) and a multitude of references for an audience of one: Godard.

The average viewer may very well sympathise with Karina having to choose between Brialy and Belmondo, but when it comes to the film, the choice is clear: just turn it off.

The Little Soldier (1963)

André Crous

Tackling the immorality of war but doing so from a stable, sterile perch, The Little Soldier points the finger of blame at all sides in France’s War on Algeria.

The Little SoldierFrance
3.5*

Director:
Jean-Luc Godard
Screenwriter:
Jean-Luc Godard
Director of Photography:
Raoul Coutard

Running time: 90 minutes

Original title: Le petit soldat

Made in 1960 but banned until 1963 because of its content, The Little Soldier was Jean-Luc Godard’s first political film. It followed hot on the heels of his wild and massively entertaining début, Breathless, which had made him famous. This, his second film, turned out to be so controversial in his native France that he would release two other films – A Woman is a Woman (1961) and My Life to Live (1962) – before the censors finally permitted it to see the light of day. The reason for the controversy was the film’s tackling of the War in Algeria and, specifically, its depiction of torture scenes involving Algerian fighters who use the French army’s methods of torture on a white French citizen.

And yet, the film is more about the protagonist’s lack of conviction than anything else. Ironically, much of the action is the result of inaction. The main character is Bruno Forestier, a young reporter for the French News Agency who is based in Geneva. At least, that is how we are first introduced to him. It is May 1958, the height of the conflict in Algeria, and he tells us in voice-over that “the time for action is over… the time for reflection has begun.” That does not sound like the start of a very dramatic story, and it won’t be, as the film will have its fair share of self-important “reflection” replete with literary quotations grabbed out of thin air.

Literature is everywhere, and, with one major exception, these references are pure Godardian onanism.  The most ludicrous reference comes early in the story onboard a train ride, when Bruno’s thoughts turn to a story by La Fontaine entitled “The Acorn and the Pumpkin”. The French title, “Le gland et la citrouille”, is repeated over and over on the soundtrack, and slowly the focus shifts only to the first part, “Le gland”. A few moments later, we see the train pass the station of “Gland”, even as a voice on the soundtrack drones on by repeating this word.

The action proper, which will culminate with such drama in the last third of the film, starts out very slowly and rather aimlessly. Bruno is involved in French intelligence-gathering operations and has been tasked with assassinating a pro-Algerian radio host in Geneva. But Bruno is not really interested in following orders – not because he feels particularly strongly one way or the other but because he doesn’t have a dog in the fight. In his opinion, you’ll get scolded for not doing something, so it’s preferable to do it even if you don’t want to. But this speaks of stunningly weak character. Bruno has no real opinions and even less passion. His passivity alone, while certainly representative of many young French men at the time, almost sinks the entire film.

Luckily for him, he meets a Danish-born Russian girl named Veronika and can’t stop thinking about her. Here, the film industry makes the first of many obtrusive appearances. Godard pays tribute to the famous Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer by giving Veronika his surname. Later, while taking photos of her, Bruno expresses one of Godard’s most famous phrases of all time: “Photography is truth, and the cinema is the truth 24 times per second.” This saying may have some validity in certain contexts, but so many of Godard’s films would seem to remind us how artificial, constructed most films are, although the truth (of the diegesis? of the world outside the film?) can certainly be a malleable concept.

Unlike Breathless, where the focus was firmly on the romance between the two main characters, A Little Soldier has little to say about the relationship between Bruno and Veronika. However, it is clear that Bruno is besotted with her, and so is the camera. Although he doesn’t look it (the film is very stingy with its emotions), Bruno is in high spirits. “I wondered if I was happy to feel free or free to feel happy”, an improvement over Patricia in Breathless, who had a more melancholy demeanour (“I don’t know if I’m not happy because I’m not free. Or not free because I’m not happy.”)

As an aside, Godard and Karina got married the next year. Following her début here, she would go on to star in another six of his films.

The Little Soldier takes an inordinate amount of time to reel us in, but around the one-hour mark, we finally reach the most dramatic portion of the narrative. And it’s a doozy. After refusing to reveal the telephone number of a close associate, Bruno is kidnapped by members of Algeria’s pro-independence FLN, who handcuff him in a bathtub and gradually escalate the torture. First, it is psychological (they show him a photo of an acquaintance who had his throat slashed), and then it is very physical: They burn him with matches and hold him underwater before wrapping his head in a sheet and waterboarding him with a handheld showerhead.

But this is Godard, so nothing seems straightforward. When he is burnt, there is a cut to a woman in the next room who is reading Mao Zedong and Lenin so that the chairman’s big thoughts (“One spark can set an entire plain ablaze”) are put in relation to the events we witness. But before we can blame the communists for such inhumane punishment, we see the Arabs are reading Henri Alleg’s La Question, which had caused a scandal when it laid out in detail how the French tortured the Algerians. This was clearly the reason the French censors banned the film until after Algeria had gained independence. With both the far right and the far left implicated in war crimes here, seemingly no one leaves unscathed.

Despite this torture, which also involves live current, Bruno doesn’t crack. “I’m not opposed to telling you, but I don’t feel like it, so I won’t”, he tells them. But while some may find his commitment to apathy admirable, Veronika makes an astute (and prescient) observation. She tells him that France will ultimately lose its battle with the Algerians because it lacks the latter’s strong ideal (namely, having an independent nation).

The film’s slow pace, its protagonist’s inscrutability and the alienation induced by the steadfast lack of emotions all make for a frustrating viewing experience. A protracted dialogue towards the end is an absolute mess of topics and sounds like a checklist by the screenwriter-director instead of an organic dialogue to bring the film to a satisfying close. Although eminently watchable, it is a far cry from Godard’s début film and hints at problems to come in his later political works.