85 | 4 stars | A-
Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Cast: Anna Karina, Sady Rebbot, André S. Labarthe
Synopsis: Nana, a young Parisian woman, ventures into prostitution as the means to a better life.
Genre: Drama
Key awards: Venice Film Festival – Special Jury Prize
Runtime: 85 minutes
Language: French (with English subtitles)
Singapore rating: NC16 (some nudity)
This review contains spoilers.
The heartbreaking fragility at the crux of the film is presented to us around fifteen minutes in. A woman visits a theatre screening Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 silent classic The Passion of Joan of Arc. Falconetti’s heroine looms on the big screen, which at times is synonymous with our own; her captors taunt and mock her, refuting her invocation of God’s will, to which her anguished face gazes impassionedly at them, tears streaming down it. The “great victory” she envisions, for which she is willing to die for, is her “martyrdom”. Immediately the camera cuts back to reality – the woman in the theatre, like Joan, is silent, solemn, sobbing.
This scene encapsulates the story of Jean-Luc Godard’s My Life to Live, known in France as Vivre sa vie. The film’s protagonist, Nana Kleinfrankenheim, is a Parisian Joan of Arc, witness to and object of her own social degradation. Unlike the martyr, however, her sacrifice appears futile, her spiral into a soulless, materialistic world cut short by death, brusque and matter-of-factly. Nana enters our view as an enigmatic force, draped in shadow and coated with a femme fatale allure; she departs as a corpse prostituted and slain on the street as her killers drive past, indifferent.
Godard’s fourth feature adopts a narrative style at once formal and freewheeling, a series of tableaux with the acerbic air of a documentary. Shot over four weeks in 1962 under a tight budget, it appropriates the structure of a novel: twelve vignettes loosely connected, each with a title (and summary) card before it. The twelve stories relate Nana’s life and her living of it. Nana, as many critics have pointed out, is the eponymous figure of Émile Zola’s novel, a figure bearing a striking resemblance to Godard’s in terms of narrative. Our film’s heroine is played by Anna Karina, an iconic figure of the French New Wave and both the director’s then-wife and muse.
The film opens with a close-up of Karina, her left-side profile shaded, her back teasingly lit. She is silent, staring downward, as the title and cast are laid over her. Michel Legrand’s theme overlays the scene as well, a brooding string ensemble in minor key aptly foreshadowing the nature of things to come. As the shot cuts to Karina’s front profile, the music stops. Then it starts again. The same occurs during the transition to her right profile. The film critic Roger Ebert interpreted this interestingly, suggesting that the music “will try to explain, but fail” ultimately in reducing Nana to a trope, a convenient melodrama.
Nana sits in a café, her back to the camera. She is with another man, and the two discuss their recent separation. Paul, played by André Labarthe, is not seen until he is; Godard cuts between the two characters who sit side-by-side, facing an external reality as they accuse each other of their personal shortcomings. Nana wants to become an actress, and sees her current occupation – a record-seller – as unsatisfying. Paul and Nana are married with a young child, and Nana is leaving them, leaving that life, in search of a new one.
This new life is an intangible one, defined by the faint prospect of limitless riches and perhaps eternal stardom. Nana and her co-workers do not lead this yet, being tight-pressed for money; she constantly asks to borrow money, first from Paul, then from the other men who intrude upon her life. She protests against her inability to pay rent, for which she is thrown out of her lodging rather brutally, frog-marched in a humiliating spectacle.
It is here that My Life to Live brings us that potent and lasting sequence. Nana becomes the spectator of her life as she joins Falconetti the actress in a silent vigil, weeping at the masculine injustice she is soon to discover. The scene is silent, Dreyer’s words flash onscreen, and Godard pays tribute to a heroism which his films memorialise, even if the heroine herself is unaware of it. Soon after, she enters another café, ditching a man who paid for her ticket and rendezvousing with another. She is offered the possibility of entering the film industry, but first has to agree to pose for nudes in order to attract potential studio clients. “You send them out to people in films,” she is told, “and a few days later maybe they phone you.” Such are the economics of the glamour industry, a backlit behind-the-scenes caught on tape, exposé-d, by the hawk-eyed Godard.
Nana’s subsequent efforts at prostituting – a result of her implied failure to act and impress – are even less romantic, grimly descending into the social realism expounded by films such as Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Accattone (1961) which features, in a similar vein, the demise of a pimp. It represents for Godard a foray into the unknown, a departure from his wild and postmodern stylistics, as seen in the “gangster” pastiche Breathless (1960) and his “musical” A Woman is a Woman (1961); even the “dark political” premise of The Little Soldier (1963; filmed in 1961) was undergirded by a frenzied bout of intellectual philosophising (quotes courtesy of Luc Sante’s insightful commentary on the Criterion website). This realism is a radical, counter-cultural presence aimed at the romantic aestheticising of French, specifically Parisian, life. Nana’s walk on the street is no longer a breathless, visual experience; her gaze lingers and travels in real time as she passes by another prostitute. After she is solicited, the pre-sex conversation dwells on payment, nothing romantic, ardent, even performative at all. She offers to undress for more money; yet when the man tries to kiss her, she violently resists him, prompting in both him and the audience a sense of surprise.
Of course, this is Godard’s charming ability to convey the most fragile and emotive bits not through jargon-heavy pondering, but through showing, acting. Karina flawlessly embodies Nana’s worldly inexperience and painfully refutes the film’s title – she does not live her life as her own; she is money’s property, she is a transactional item, a passing of the time – and her performance is so skilled and fluid it feels natural, as if this really were an exposé of the whorehouse and of the cultural industry.
Soon, Nana meets Raoul, a pimp who sizes her up at a café and power-plays her into submission. Raoul remarks to Yvette, their mutual friend: “Insult her. If she’s a tramp she’ll get angry; if a lady, she’ll smile.” He denigrates her looks as an attempt at provocation; these not-so-micro-aggressions, in contemporary terms, are met with – yes – a smile. The mood is carefree, even cheerful, as Jean Ferrat’s ‘Ma Môme’ (My bird) crystallises from the jukebox, the camera-voyeur upon two neighbouring lovers, leading up to Raoul and Nana encountering each other. Nana plays into a system of masculine strength, an environs of misogynistic Hollywood charm, which culminates in an intense but hurried spectacle of violence. Gunshots ring from the street outside; a wounded man ducks into the café, his face bloodied; Nana transits from a playful and seductive setting into a setting of unforgiving death; she ducks out of the café, running for her life, and marking her transition is the camera’s “rapid-fire jump-cutting” (from Roland-François Lack’s comprehensive introduction), paralleling the machine-gun phallus and courtesy of Godard’s ingenious editing. It is one of many daunting images presaging an inevitable destruction.
Raoul finds Nana writing a letter of application to a lady pimp, possibly by Yvette’s recommendation. He questions that choice, enquires into her motivations, and offers in place of the addressee’s job his own. An earlier encounter between Nana and the film agent is echoed here. As Nana dons the countenance of a whore, embeds herself within that societal function, the camera depicts her multiple clients (minus the act of sex, always only the encounter, the set-up before the inevitable obscenity) with an incredibly wooden and somewhat hilarious voiceover. Nana seeks clarifications to her job, which Raoul duly provides. “Must she be beautiful?” “No, although beauty is an important factor in a prostitute’s career. It attracts the attention of the pimp, since physical allure can be an immense source of profit.” His passive, third-person legalese is ironic considering Nana’s earnest idealism, her desire to have sex for money, one arguably done on her own free will. It is also tragic, reflecting a larger divide between the sexes: the rational, bureaucratic male on top of the effeminate, talkative, inquisitive female.
Little more happens, narrative-wise. In yet another café, Nana (on one of her breaks from work) breaks into a freestyle dance, channeling the still-uncorrupted part of her. A young man playing billiards alone is her only onlooker; the other two in the room, Raoul and another man, are engaged in conversation and scorn her. The vignette’s (number 9) title card reads “A YOUNG MAN – NANA WONDERS IF SHE’S HAPPY”. The very next episode answers that for us: Nana services a client who suggests a threesome; as Elizabeth, another of Raoul’s escorts, appears, the man turns to her and forgets all about Nana. Even in work, which demands of one only their willingness and ability, she encounters only despair.
The film’s intellectual climax occurs when Nana chats with a philosopher (played by a real-life one, Brice Parain). The details of their discussion are the subject of their own entire essay, but the gist of it involves the notion of free will and determinism, of thinking and acting. The philosopher brings up Porthos from The Three Musketeers, ruminates on language and love, and elicits from her a skepticism towards truth (“How can one be sure of having found the right word?”). He concludes that Nana’s “love” for the world, for men, for a vague totality, is immature, an “impure affair”. “Love is a solution, on condition that it is true.”
How true any of the love depicted in the film, even the traces of Nana and Paul’s failed marriage, is, soon becomes apparent. Just as soon as the world is uncovered to her in theory, the praxis utterly contradicts and ironises it. A bid between pimps leads to Raoul selling her to another. The deal goes wrong, a gun is pulled, and it is Nana, not Raoul, who receives the phallic bullet, struck limp to the ground. She stumbles onto Raoul’s car, a last-ditch appeal to her would-be saviour. Raoul drives off, and so do the others. The deal is concluded, neither party has triumphed, and they go their separate ways. Nana remains, the nightmare of every prostitute, the Jane Doe figurine of grisly horror tales, the lifeless figure lived.
Nana’s embodiment of the young, independent, and optimistic woman is both satirised and dramatised in the film. Godard’s title is enigmatic: while the latter seems more reasonable given how she leads a false and foreign existence, blinded by her exuberant idealism, the satirical element does come in when we take the assertive, individualist tone into account, interpreting it as a manifesto to take control of her life by willingly submitting to it. Is it a rejection of the young counterculture, chastising the hippie critics of modernism, the Enlightenment, modern society, the nuclear family, etc.? Or does the name hint at a more sinister cynicism, one that feigns and maintains ignorance despite the non-martyring of Nana, a faux-Joan whose death is too everyday to be noticed, too secular to be captured on celluloid, save the documentary’s?
One might find some respite in the references and allusions that Godard unabashedly employs throughout. Books are a favourite; the young man, towards the end, reads from Edgar Allen Poe, capturing a sentiment of confusion between the authentic and the inauthentic, the real and the simulacrum – a huge imprint of Borges. In the record shop earlier on, a cover of ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’ (released 1961) stays prominently in view, another artifact of contemporary America’s influence on Paris, and Paris’ emulation of its materialistically superior cousin. The jukebox figures often; the technological alienation of capitalist culture overpowers Nana’s once-off shelter from its moral decadence – she visits the cinema just once, sees the film, weeps like (and for that moment is) Joan of Arc, and has passed that moment, her life over. Godard’s camera also works magic into the formalist organisation of the narrative. The camera swivels and pans frequently, sometimes unfocused, once, from a scene of Nana in a café, to the street outside, seemingly without reason. It is more than arbitrary, annoying fun; Godard makes us the camera, subject to the bombardment of an external people and place but only allowing us temporary, limited, minimal access.
A particular scene caught my attention: in the fourth vignette, the police question Nana regarding a charge pressed by another woman accusing her of theft. Nana says the woman dropped the money, and when she came back, having “stared into [her] eyes for a long time”, she relented. There is a double interrogation, and a double truth. Was her response to the woman’s gaze sincere and childish, innocent and timid? And was what she told the police the truth in itself?
The ambiguity of Nana’s character makes us more sympathetic towards her – it is this frankness, this willingness to convey all, realist-style, that challenges the audience so used to a sweetened or dramatic treatment of relationships, under-stimulating, intellectually blank. Another local critic, Eternality Tan, reads My Life to Live as “a piece on female transience”; that is indeed true, but misses the point. Godard’s Karina is an immortal heroine playing a transient female wishing she were immortal. It is not so much female transience as it is the transience of the eternal feminine, the cinematic standard, the living life.
Criterion trailer (with spoilers):
Film OST (ft. Michel Legrand):
With thanks to Criterion, Eternality Tan, Roger Ebert, Senses of Cinema, and Vague Visages.