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