Godard’s portrait of a Paris shopgirl who drifts into prostitution is told in twelve numbered chapters, coolly, and Anna Karina makes nearly every one of them ache. It is a cold film that keeps producing warmth. The last chapter is the only weak one.
The credits of Vivre Sa Vie are three shots of Anna Karina’s head: left profile, right profile, then full face, lit from one side, while a few bars of Michel Legrand’s strings begin and break off. The first scene is a conversation in a café between Nana (Karina) and the husband she has left, Paul (André S. Labarthe), and Raoul Coutard films the whole of it from behind their heads. We have just been shown this face from three angles and now we are refused it. Jean-Luc Godard tells the rest in twelve numbered chapters, each introduced by a card that says what will happen in it, and the whole thing runs 84 minutes.
It is one of his best films, and the one we would hand to anyone who has found the rest of him a chore. Whatever else Godard is doing, and he is doing a great deal, he never takes his eyes off one woman for long. Nana sells records, cannot pay her rent, tries and fails to steal 1,000 francs, and goes to work on the boulevards. The film is cold on purpose and it keeps producing warmth anyway, nearly all of it Karina’s.
Two scenes did it for us. In the third chapter Nana sits alone in a cinema watching Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, and Godard cuts between Falconetti’s face and Karina’s as she cries at it, in silence. We knew exactly what he was doing, one suffering face set beside another, and it moved us anyway; what got us was that Karina’s tears look like a real person’s, blotchy and unflattering, not a close-up’s. Later she puts a coin in a jukebox and dances round a pool table for a young man who barely looks up, all elbows and kicked heels, while Raoul (Sady Rebbot) talks business at a table. We smiled the whole way through it, and then the record ended.
Coutard shoots in black and white with what looks like the light that was already there when the crew walked in. He tracks along bars and settles behind shoulders, and when Nana writes a letter asking for work in a brothel he holds on the page for minutes while she thinks about the spelling. In the eighth chapter Raoul recites the hours, prices and regulations of the trade in a flat voice over a run of hotel doors, stairwells and clients undressing, and Agnès Guillemot, cutting with Godard, keeps the pictures as level as the voice. Christiane Fageol puts Karina in a dark coat with a fur collar and leaves her the bob, and Legrand’s theme returns a dozen times and never gets to the end of itself.
The chapter most critics call the dead patch is the eleventh, in which Nana sits in a café with a philosopher, played by the philosopher Brice Parain, and asks whether a person could live without speaking. He tells her about Porthos, who dies because he stops to think. It is the one stretch where Godard’s interests plainly outrun Nana’s, and it nearly works anyway, because Karina listens like someone hearing the idea for the first time and Parain talks to her as if she had a right to it.
The twelfth chapter is where the film goes wrong. A young man (Peter Kassovitz) reads Poe’s “The Oval Portrait”, about a painter whose picture of his wife takes her life as it takes her likeness, and the voice reading it is Godard’s own, dubbed over the actor. Karina was married to Godard when they made this, and for the length of that scene the film is about him rather than her. What follows we will not describe, except that it turns into a different sort of film in about two minutes, and it is the only part that feels as though he had stopped caring how it looked.
Set against his other work it is the plainest thing he made in those years: fewer gags, fewer quotations, one face. Watch it with the subtitles off if your French will stand it, and if not, do not spend the whole time reading. Most of what Nana thinks is in what Karina does between the lines.
