I love this movie so much

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

See Adrin Neatrour crits at www.crinklecut.co.uk After the opening title sequence Godard's Vivre sa vie cuts to a long durational close shot in which the camera, tracks between a couple who are seated beside each other on bar stools at the counter of a café. They are talking about the nature of their relationship and its break up. As the camera tracks back and forth across the space between them, only one of them is ever in frame, and the shot set up is from behind, so that as they talk, we see only the back of a head.The what is said by this shot is in itself both witty and analytic. It allows the camera to express the opening concepts of alienation, separation within a context of movement. The wit lies in emotionally de-saturating the dialogue from faciality as Nana and her ex talk about the failure of their relationship her beef about his attempts to control her and his economic angle as Nana's ex signs off with the observation that as a musician, Nana is leaving him because he is poor. The ultimate deficiency in a culture based on consumption rather than production.With Anna K playing the role of Nana Godard's film is in content, a modernist rephrasing of Zola's eponymous novel charting the transformation of a young operetta star into a high class prostitute, whose allure and cold blooded exploitation of her sexuality destroy all the men who become infatuated with her.The power of Nana's presence is described by Zola as a psychic emanation that irresistibly attracts male desire. Godard's transposes elements of the Zola story. But because this is now an image driven culture, his Nana in the form of Karina, exists as an object of desire for the camera. It is Godard's camera that loves her image embraces and devours her. When Nana leaves her job in the record shop and takes up prostitution, her male clients barely seem to notice her. Throughout the film the men are self absorbed, as if playing pinball or engaging in masturbation, they barely notice Nana. She is simply someone they pay. Unlike their wives or girlfriends they have to shell out coin.The ethos of cool detachment pervades Vivre sa vie. The guys all wear coats turned up at the collar as they move through a world of artefacts, cafes, and automobiles. The women, immaculately coiffed and kitted out with couture outfits and shoes. It is a world without emotion, the world of advertising, where there are settings backdrops and product display.But Godard fixes his movies with pure concept. To oppose Nana's image defined world he uses a number of cinematic devices, simply interpolated that he cuts into the body of the film. Like the chapter headings they comprise a breaking up of flow, an opening up different idea spectra about what we are seeing.The inter cutting of a section of Dreyer's The Passion of Jean d'Arc. Godard uses a scene with Artaud, theoretician of the theatre of cruelty who plays the monk, Massieu questioning Falconetti's Jeanne. The Material grilling the Spiritual. A section of Edgar Allen Poe, the master of unnameable dread (uncool) is read on camera and later during one of Nana's assignations with a client, the results of the statistical survey of Parisian prostitution are intoned as voice over.There are two more extraordinary interpolations inserted of the body of the film. The scene where a guy mimes the process of a little boy blowing up a balloon. As performance it is intense funny and suddenly in its intensity and power feels like a transposition of male ejaculation. A hyper parody of in-existent sexuality. In a nondescript section of a cafe, Nana and a Philosopher talk about life specifically focusing on 'love' (uncool) at the end of their discussion. Unlike the tracking two shot at the front of the movie, this is shot full face with and pans from Nana to the Philosopher, with the Philosopher finally concluding, in response to Nana's question that love is real "…on condition it is true." In a culture of image how to find what is true and be able to distinguish it from what is not true? In a world of mirrors….Eddie Constantine appears as a spectre throughout Vivre sa vie. His presence as an image inside Nana's head a constant source of reference. And it is almost as if he were in the film, and if you squint your eyes you may see him.With Godard, film doesn't just think, it lives and breaths a world of unseen possibilities .

I remember being stunned when i saw this in the cinema in the 60s and i am delighted to find that it holds up so well. The chapter heads look a little forced now but that hasn't stopped others copying it and it does avoid the compulsion to adhere to a strict narrative flow. Wonderful performance from Anna Karina and such good cinematography from the masterful, Raoul Coutard. We see nothing in the round, nothing in the whole. A corner of a wall, part of a poster or street sign and only bits and pieces of the performers most of the time. A marvellous sequence in a record shop begins fairly ordinarily then runs along the record racks before slipping sideways and giving us a view out of the window. It is not forced or theatrical but just how things really are. The opening section is set with the boy and girl sat at a mirrored bar. We see only the backs of their heads but for the occasional reflection, yet it seems so real, a truth touched upon in all its fragility. The dialogue throughout most of the film is stark and spare but more poetic and rounded towards the end, culminating in the inspired 'chat' between Karina and 'the philosopher' when all is made clear. The denouement is a farcical but dreadful surprise and the direction throughout, assured and audacious. This may or may not be truth 24 frames a second but certainly it is true cinema!

Jean-Luc Godard is one of the hardest filmmakers to like, films like "Breathless" and "Pierrot le fou" may not please many especially fans of blockbusters and even fans of independent films and different kind of movies, but Vivre sa Vie (or My life to live) is perhaps his most accessible and realistic work to be its most distinctive film, this film, Godard virtually sacrifices the type of cinema that made him a world cinema icon, but the Godard cinema can still be found on this film. Divided into 12 chapters (or "tableaux"), A young Parisian woman who abandoned her husband and son to try to be an actress in Paris, but with no other option, she becomes a prostitute. The film, unlike the other from the director, has little background music and a few dialogue's typical that director usually put in his films, he uses a realistic atmosphere and little pleasant showing 12 unconnected but salient parts, some a little depressing,of the life of this woman (Nana, played by Anna Karina, Godard's muse)while she is in Paris. The film addresses issues such as prostitution, disappointment and the difficulty of trying to live a new life and end up going to an even worse, the cruelty of fate, and various other themes in a realistic and little conventional way. Even if the movie has some depressing scenes, there are some funny and somewhat relaxed scenes. Sometimes, words do not say everything we want and then they disappoint us, the same thing as fate made with Nana.

So far in my exploration of Jean-Luc Godard I have remained in his masterful decade of the '60s, and as a result I've been treated mostly to films that are fun and exciting, toying with structure and cinematic conventions. Vivre Sa Vie fits firmly in his career, but it's also a surprising contrast to his other work which I have seen so far. Even in his more narratively focused Breathless, there's still a very cinematic quality to it, portraying a sense of freedom of expression and romanticism. Vivre Sa Vie strips away all of that and elects instead to present an almost documentarian look into the descent of the young Nana (Anna Karina, naturally) into prostitution.The structure of the film is split into twelve episodes that bring us through Nana's progression. She's a young Parisian girl working at a record shop who wants to be in the movies, but needs money to pay her rent. It's a simple story, but the way Godard tells it is what makes it so intriguing. He presents Nana as an object of desire to many but an object of interest to very few. The men around her aren't interested in what she has to say, they put up with her words in order to get to what they are really looking for, her body and ways to profit off of it.Karina's dance scene is classic Godard, but his unique approach to this film makes it much less freeing than in his other works. The dance in Band of Outsiders is a jaunty display of youthful rhythm and A Woman Is A Woman is loaded with fun numbers, but here the art of dance takes on an entirely different, and much more tragic, meaning. For Nana, it's a desperate plea to get attention using the only thing that she knows how, her body. In regards to the film, Godard stated, "The few episodes in her life that I am going to film are very likely of little interest to others, but most important to Nana," and I feel that he accomplished his goal very well here.These episodes to most would seem relatively mundane, just normal days in the life of a prostitute, conversations and interactions of the daily routine, but for Nana they mean so much more. Her trip to the cinema to see The Passion of Joan of Arc has become almost iconic in Godard's legacy, and for good reason. In this moment Godard removes us from our state as voyeurs and instead plays us into Nana's position. He displays Nana as the film viewer, presenting the kind of emotional impact and life revelation that cinema can have on someone and getting the audience to completely empathize with her. Nana becomes the audience and, as a result, the audience becomes her.The descent into prostitution is intriguing here, thanks in large part to the captivating and expressive work by Godard's muse, but Godard's metaphor for the life of an actress is also a fascinating theme that one can't help but notice. Displays Nana as the prostitute in her world of pimps and photographers, people passing her back and forth like a piece of meat, it certainly seems that he's making a statement on the film industry and the nature of exploitation in how actors are treated. They are passed back and forth by directors, producers, even the audience, and used for their image, much like a prostitute, and it's up to the actress to keep themselves in tact. As the opening quote of the film states, "Lend yourself to others. But give yourself to yourself".I've seen people refer to the film as the "morning after" state of the Godard/Karina dynamic and I think that's an interesting way of looking at it. They had collaborated several times before, and would collaborate for many years after still, but Vivre Sa Vie seems to be the most intimate and exposing look into the relationship between the two of them as lovers and the relationship between actor and director at large. It's a very introspective journey that Godard takes us on, and certainly one of the most impressive I've seen from him yet.