Blending gangster shootouts with a documentary study of a Parisian streetwalker, "Vivre Sa Vie" is one of Jean-Luc Godard's most complex films and reveals a ferociously cinematic intelligence.
By separating this story of a woman's ill-fated descent into prostitution into 12 chapters, Godard never lets us forget the artificiality of what we're watching, turning the film into a masterful meditation on cinema, capitalism, and sex.
After leaving her husband, Nana (Karina) is slowly driven towards a life working the streets. Pimp Raoul (Rebbot) teaches her the tricks of the trade, but when Nana falls in love and tries to escape the streets, Raoul's not ready to let his latest commodity slip out of his hands so easily.
Infusing its B-movie plot with some typically French existential weightiness, Godard places his feisty heroine in a gorgeous looking 60s Paris where coffee bars are populated by philosophers and the streets are awash with machine gun-toting gangsters. Testing the limits of film language, Godard sets up each scene with a flourish, using zooms, pans and close-ups in such unusual and unexpected ways that he challenges all our preconceptions of what cinema is, what it does, and what it can be.
Meanwhile, his characters work their way through a script that meanders through a series of philosophical conundrums ("I think we're always responsible for our actions, we're free", exclaims Nana), which are intermittently offset by moments of conspicuous comedy (a gangster miming a child blowing up a balloon; an impromptu jukebox dance scene).
This is Godard at his most playful, and "Vivre Sa Vie" is by turns low-brow, high-brow, action-packed and dialogue driven. It's a masterpiece of inventiveness that's as radically mind-blowing today as it was four decades ago.
In French with English subtitles.
Vivre Sa Vie (1962)
