Vivre Sa Vie

For his fourth film, Jean-Luc Godard diverted course and made a film that, on its face, was much more conventional in form than the first three. Vivre Sa Vie (My Life to Live), from 1962, was inspired on a sociological study of prostitution, and is a grim, almost clinical look at the oldest profession. As I was watching it, I was at times confounded by its precision and bloodlessness, but upon reflection I realized that it is a near masterpiece, and a philosophical treatise on the very nature of language and existence.

Dedicated to B pictures, and opening with close-ups of his muse, Anna Karina, we then get an epigraph from Montaigne: "Lend yourself to others, but give yourself only to yourself." Karina is a clerk in a record shop who is behind on her rent, and ends up working the streets. She meets a fellow who becomes her pimp, and she's soon working in a brothel. A montage of her meeting clients is accompanied by a voiceover of words taken directly from the study, which details the life of a prostitute, including the laws affecting them, how much they charge, and if they get days off. The film is structured as a series of twelve tableaux, each introduced by a title card, as if it were a novel. By the end, Karina has lent herself too much to others.

Whereas in Godard's other films, particularly A Woman Is a Woman, where theatrically dominates, and characters look into the camera, Vivre Sa Vie is more conventional. In fact, this first tableau has two characters who not only don't look into the camera, they are filmed from behind, sitting at the counter of a diner, ending their relationship. Godard's camera is very precise, frequently not moving at all. Only once, near the end of the film, does Karina pointedly gaze into the camera, and when she does I felt stunned, as if I were caught peeping through her window.

The overriding theme of the film is woman as object. There's a stunning scene where Karina moves through the brothel, looking for another whore to make a third with a client. She stumbles upon many women in dishabille, but they aren't in the clinch with clients, they are posed, as if sitting for artists (this is one of the least sexy films about prostitution, ever). In the last scene, Godard himself reads from Poe's story "The Oval Portrait," which is about a painter who, while painting a portrait of his beloved, drains her of life, like an artistic vampire. That Godard himself reads from the story is telling, as of course Karina was his wife at this point.

That story ends with the words, "She was dead." The other dominant reference in the film comes earlier, when Karina goes to a movie and it happens to be Theodore Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc. She was the iconic saint/whore of Western culture, and he shows a fairly long clip in which she discusses her coming martyrdom, the clip ending with the title card, "Death." It doesn't take a genius to worry about Karina's fate in this film.

This film could survive multiple viewings to fully glean its treasures. It is available in a Criterion edition, with a number of extras and a commentary, and the photography by Raoul Coutard looks smashing. I also liked the score, by Michel Legrand. This is a stunning work, all around.