A Face is a Face: The Price of Freedom in Vivre Sa Vie (1962)
By Trevor Ruth
This review contains spoilers
Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie (1962, translated as My Life to Live) tells the story of Nana, a young woman living in Paris with dreams of becoming a successful actress before eventually resorting to prostitution to make money for herself and survive on her own. A vestige of late modernism, Vivre Sa Vie is a poem told in twelve chapters (or tableaux) with summarizing prefaces that depict the events of the plot before they even occur, similar to a work of classic literature. It’s also a deceptively simple narrative, though the film is meant to be more of a character study than a sprawling epic. Unlike other films that focus on the woman’s role in society with a sense of morose despondency, Godard’s film approaches the concept with a more impressionistic and introspective flair. This is not a critical piece that views the poor treatment of women in society, like Mizoguchi’s The Life of Oharu (1952), but rather it views the decline of the protagonist’s status and livelihood as an expression of her freedom. Does this mean that Nana’s story is not as tragic as Oharu’s? Not necessarily. As the title suggests, the life is Nana’s to live, and while the film is met with a bleak conclusion, it is merely a product of her approach towards her newfound freedom and search for happiness.
The film opens with a beautifully rendered credit crawl superimposed across a side-profile, portrait and reverse side-profile of our main character with Michel Legrand’s melancholy, classical score beginning and ending abruptly in jarring portions of winds, reeds and minor strings. It’s a far-cry from the quickfire, jazz-inspired editing of Breathless (1960). Instead, it is very somber and emotional, though somehow still impersonal as the theme music is spliced repeatedly throughout the film. Nana is played by Godard’s wife (and frequent collaborator), Anna Karina, who is fantastic. She’s sympathetically minimal, expressing more with her eyes than any other part of the face. The first chapter of the film focuses on an interaction between Nana and her ex-boyfriend with the camera directed towards their backs as they sit next to each other in a café. All we see are their backs for the majority of this scene, but we can feel the tension held between them, the haphazard dreaminess of Nana’s character when she speaks poetic and introspective lines such as: “I didn’t know the right way to say it. Or I did know, but I don’t anymore. Just when I should know, too.” This line tells us everything we need to know about Nana; she’s indecisive, maybe a little impulsive, but ultimately unsure of where her life is leading her. When her face does appear on camera, we can get a sense of her broken confidence as a young and impressionable woman: when she is asked by her future pimp to smile, she steels herself against it before the awkward, silent stare-down between the two of them is enhanced by the camera panning from one character to another, resulting in Nana’s complexion breaking, her eyes turned down in subtle, flirtatious embarrassment.
The relationship between Raoul Coutard’s cinematography and Godard’s editing is unparalleled here. Traces of Godard’s signature fast-paced cuts make an appearance during a brilliantly timed scene involving a shootout, but the camera itself is more calculated in its presentation of setting. We see this in the second chapter, which shows Nana at her job in a record store. We open with lovely B-roll shots of Paris and are quickly transported into the store; a static medium of Nana speaking to a customer becomes a tracking shot that shows the records on the wall behind the counter, before immediately reversing, stopping, then panning as Nana searches other parts of the store. We then pan back into another tracking shot that performs the same slingshot maneuver and finally, the camera pans out towards a window, fading out on a group of pedestrians crossing a busy street. Meanwhile, the rest of the imagery is unforgettable and mostly impressionistic: a close-up of a man putting his hand in his pocket for some money during Nana’s first prostitution gig becomes connotatively dark. Other simplistic close-ups of Nana with her back towards the camera serve the same purpose, with her shadow drawn across an empty coat hanger on a white wall and a dark hand reaching up from the bottom of the screen, moving towards the bare skin of her shoulder.
Again, while these images may suggest otherwise, the film does not act as criticism on the poor treatment of women in society. Nana is acting of her own free will. She states this multiple times in the film: “I think we're always responsible for our actions. We're free. I raise my hand—I'm responsible. I turn my head to the right—I'm responsible. I'm unhappy—I'm responsible. I smoke a cigarette—I'm responsible. I shut my eyes—I'm responsible. I forget that I'm responsible, but I am.” This Sartrean ideal of one’s freedom and the consequences of that freedom certainly come as a result of transgressive influence. In chapter three, Nana goes on a date with a man to the movie theater to watch Carl Theodore Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928), where scenes of Joan’s trial are interplayed with Nana’s face in the darkness, a single tear reflecting in the black as it draws down her cheek. It is one of the few instances in the film where we see an emotional reaction from Nana, and becomes the catalyst for her sudden descent into her job as a sex worker because she has the freedom to reject the narrative that her current life has given her. We start to see Nana and Joan as one in the same, at times, exhibiting similarities much more jarring than their identical haircuts: the expressions displayed in the close-ups on Nana’s face while she is being questioned by the police, among other quieter instances, appear transfixed like Maria Falconetti’s Joan, the downcast view contrasting heavily against Falconetti’s bright white, upward-facing visage. Not to mention, the lower-third silent film-styled captions, implemented in the final chapter, are no doubt a nod to Dreyer’s film. Godard himself, however, does seem to like using these subtitles experimentally, like in his film, A Woman is a Woman (1961). This also ties in beautifully with a prior conversation that Nana has with a philosopher at a café: “I think one should just keep quiet, live in silence. The more one talks, the less the words mean.”
The dialogue in Vivre Sa Vie is incomparable, though this is to be expected from a Godard production. He does not like small talk; his characters are notably simplistic in their actions and their goals, but through discussion, we learn so much of what drives them towards those goals and what shapes their values. The best analogy that can be made for Godard’s character writing—surprisingly—comes from Raoul, Nana’s pimp: “A bird is an animal with an inside and an outside. Take away the outside and the inside is left. Take away the inside and you see its soul.” The same might be said for Nana, as well. On the exterior, we have a young girl with dreams of becoming famous through acting and modeling. In the beginning of the film, her ex-boyfriend does not share this dream with her: “Don’t talk nonsense. This isn’t a stage.” It is for this reason that they decide to separate. Once her coquettish demeanor is stripped away Nana resorts to exposing herself before others, literally and figuratively, showing them how she appears on the inside. By offering her body to others she forfeits everything that she has in a physical sense. What we don’t see, until later, is Nana’s soul; what she ultimately wants from life. In her conversation with the philosopher, Nana asks what he thinks about love. In response, the philosopher discloses that real love can only be attained through an accumulation of experience: “To be completely at one with that love takes maturity. That means searching. That’s the truth of life.” We learn that Nana’s real goal is not simply to exist, but to feel loved, to feel cherished. She could not find that kind of love from her ex, “It’s exhausting loving you. I always have to beg,” nor could she find it in her failed career as an actress. Her job as a prostitute does not help her in finding love, either: she tries to hook up with a couple of men at a café, dancing to a song that she sets on the jukebox, but she fails to make an impression on anyone but herself. To this end, her new life gives her the freedom to dance, but she still has a sense of uncertainty when she stops dancing and you can see, for a split second, the disappointment her freedom has brought her. In a scene of foreshadowing, the philosopher discloses how a different kind of freedom—the freedom to think—leads to our ultimate demise. He does this by alluding to a scene from Alexandre Dumas’ Twenty Years Later (1845), where Porthos accidentally kills himself by blowing up a building:
“He’s never had a thought in his life. He places the bomb, lights the fuse and starts to run away. But just then he begins to think. About what? How it’s possible to put one foot in front of the other[…]The bomb explodes and the cellar caves in around him. He holds it up with his strong shoulders, but after a day or two, he’s crushed to death. So the first time he thought, it killed him.”
Such is, unfortunately, the fate of our dear Nana, as well.
The ending to Vivre Sa Vie comes rather jarringly, and in some way, I wouldn’t be surprised if the suddenness of the closing events did not turn viewers away from the film entirely, yet I believe that the nature of Nana’s death is important to consider regardless. Through a basic tracking shot and pan we watch as Nana is sold to a new group of pimps before Raoul and another pimp shoot her during a conflict and she falls dead in the street. The camera pans down to show the street and Nana’s abandoned body before suddenly cutting to an end title card where Legrand’s theme returns once again. The sequence happens so casually that one almost has to laugh. There’s nothing glamorous or loving about Nana’s murder. However, in a stylistically Scorsese fashion, there is also very little emotion to take away from this death, too. The camera does the bare minimum to make the scene fit together. There are no cuts, no zoom-ins, nothing to capture the terror that Nana is feeling in the moment, and the simplicity of the final salutation to the audience exposes a disingenuousness that seems to act as a motif in the film. So much of Vivre Sa Vie—admittedly—appears impersonal.
When Nana and her client tell each other that they love one another in the final chapter, we are treated to four different shots of them embracing, as if they were acting out a part for a different film and Godard decided to use all four takes. Because of this, the ending acts more as a parody of a tragedy, drawing on the denouement of a conventional drama to invent a kind of illusion; one that masks the true soul of the film. The soul of Vivre Sa Vie rests with Nana and her search for happiness and truth. What she discovers is a freedom of self that is liberating, but also rather unsatisfying. She might not have discovered the love she was looking for—at least, not a true version of the love she might have been searching for—but she knew that whatever affection she received in the end was a product of her own design. So long as she was able to confide in that idea, she was able to live confidently, knowing that it was her life to live.
Trevor Ruth is a writer from Livermore, California, whose work has previously appeared in Occam’s Razor, The Southampton Review, and other literary journals. He writes fiction and poetry that utilizes slipstream to subvert genre ideals, as well as critical essays on film and art. Find more of his work on Instagram @crimsoncomet3.