Vivre Sa vie (1962): Godard, the ultimate cinephile, makes his most emotional film (Blu-Ray Review)

Which film director best exemplifies cinephilia? For many people today, the answer would be Quentin Tarantino, who’s just published a book giving his personal take on film history, Cinema Speculation. For Godard – who was less than flattered by Tarantino naming his production company after Godard’s 1964 film Bande a Part – this would be grounds for disqualification. If you’re writing a book about something rather than making a film, you don’t love film enough. Godard’s cinephilia is not the cinephilia of someone who only cares about movies; his films are dense with allusions to philosophy, politics, theatre, literature and painting. Rather, it’s the result of believing cinema is the ultimate way to express your opinions about these other subjects. One example comes at regular intervals in his 1962 film Vivre sa vie, reissued on Blu-Ray by Criterion UK. Vivre sa vie is a film of conversations, divided into twelve chapters, each of which has a title that indexes what is about to happen in the manner of 17th and 18th-century novels. Yet by forcing these literary conventions into the cinema space, he reinvents both the conventions and the movies.

Vivre sa vie arrived at a difficult moment for both Godard and the nouvelle vague, the collective of film critics turned directors he was a key member of. His debut, Breathless, had been a sensation, but its follow-up, Le petit soldad, was banned for its discussion of Algerian independence. His third film, an eccentric tribute to MGM musicals called A Woman is a Woman, hadn’t been a hit; Godard had also found the experience of shooting on soundstages rather than on location to be stifling and uncreative. All these setbacks were welcomed by those who thought the so-called “new wave” was a passing fad. His marriage to Anna Karina, who his last two films had starred, was also going through difficulties. True to form, Godard decided to mend their relationship using movies, planning his next film as a showcase of her abilities that would send her career to a new level.

In this regard, and in most other regards, Vivre sa vie is a success. The story of Nana, a young Parisian woman who finds herself drifting into prostitution, it’s Godard’s most linear film and as such his most emotional. When Nana goes to see a screening of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (the complete print of which had been rediscovered just ten years earlier) she watches Maria Falconetti’s bruised, chapped face shed a tear, and she responds in kind. The invocation of Dreyer would be pure hubris if the rest of Godard’s film didn’t show he had the talent to back it up. The close-ups of Karina are as powerful as anything Dreyer found in Falconetti’s face, with one in particular – Nana indifferently exhaling cigarette smoke while embracing a man – being reproduced regularly. It appeared recently on the cover of Deborah Levy’s book The Cost of Living.

The Cost of Living would have been a good alternative title for Godard’s later film about prostitution, Two or Three Things I Know About Her. That film, made shortly before the director briefly devoted himself to Leftist agitprop as part of the Dziga Vertov Group, is explicit about portraying prostitution as the terminal stage of capitalist exploitation. Juliette, the protagonist of the later film, sells her body because she considers it normal to commodify herself, but it’s harder to read Nana. Literally – the opening scene, where she breaks up with her boyfriend, focuses on the back of her head, only giving us a vague sense of what she looks like by way of a mirror some distance from her. Somehow this only builds our identification with her; the longer the first facial close-up is withheld, the more we become desperate to find out what this woman looks like, how she reacts, and whether we can get any more emotion from her face than from her voice.

Perhaps we can’t. For all Godard was not yet a fully committed Marxist at this stage, he was certainly an existentialist. He was a keen reader of Sartre, and Vivre sa vie is most satisfying as a film about alienation. Nana is a woman who has no idea what she wants or who she is, someone constantly looking at the back of her own head. This enables other people to take advantage of her, a charge Godard does not absolve himself from. He was, after all, making this film in the hope that it would extend his marriage to the star. At one point, Nana’s boyfriend reads aloud from ‘The Oval Portrait’, an Edgar Allen Poe story that Godard later planned to film with Karina. The story of an artist whose quest for the perfect portrait ends up mysteriously draining the life from his model, it’s an allegory for art and life as mutually destructive, and when the actor Peter Kassovitz starts reading from the story Godard overdubs his own voice over Kassovitz. It feels meaningful that Nana’s pimp is called Raoul, the same name as Godard’s brilliantly inventive cinematographer Raoul Coutard: every time his name is called, it feels like a fourth wall break.

Despite Godard’s ambitions to make a more classical, composed, tragic film, he can’t restrain himself from pieces of mischief like this. Fans of the director’s later work will enjoy seeing a few recurring traits in embryo, from the impromptu dance scene to the musician’s cameo. (In fact, these arrive in the same scene, with the singer-songwriter Jean Ferrat putting his own song ‘Ma Môme’ on the jukebox for Karina to dance to) There’s also one of those wistful late-film philosophical discussions that Godard perfected with the incredible Raymond Devos cameo in Pierrot le fou – here, the conversation is initiated, rather sweetly, by Godard’s former philosophy teacher Brice Parain. I have to admit to being unconvinced by the ending, which reduces Nana’s story to a more conventional, melodramatic kind of tragedy than the tragedy of modern-day alienation the rest of the film is devoted to. But mostly the only counter-argument against Susan Sontag’s description of Vivre sa vie as “a perfect film” is the knowledge that Godard would go on to make even better films than this.

Comparing the extras on this Criterion disc to the previous Region 2 Blu-Ray, released by the BFI in 2015, is a study in complementary approaches. Both feature a commentary track by Adrian Martin, as well as archive interviews, but the earlier disc included Godard’s three most important early shorts – All the Boys are Called Patrick, Charlotte and her Man and A Story of Water – which aren’t present here. There is a kind of Godard short film, in the shape of his typically eccentric trailer (spoiler warning!). Where the Criterion extras score over the BFI release is in the inclusion of two featurettes about Où en est la prostitution, an essay by Marcel Sacotte which inspired Vivre sa vie. The down side of Godard being the ultimate cinephile is that people rarely consider his literary sources, mostly dismissing them as commercial requirements which the films quickly transcended. This is not inaccurate, but looking back over the books, stories and articles that caught Godard’s eye can give us fresh insight into where his inspiration came from. It’s to Criterion’s credit that they allow us the opportunity to do just that.

Graham’s Archive: Vivre Sa Vie (1962)