dromasca I usually try to form my opinion about films based on how entertaining or interesting or enriching or none of these I felt that they were during the time spent watching them. Only afterwards I try to understand why I liked or disliked the film, what caused me to find it funny, what I had learned from it, whether I exited as a better being (or not) at the end of the film. In the case of 'My Life to Live' (the original French title is 'Vivre sa vie' - 'Living her own life') going back to the roots of the pleasure of watching this movie also means placing it in the context of the cinema at the beginning of the 60s, and the extraordinary revolution brought by a handful of French directors Jean-Luc Godard was part of, in the way movies are made and the way spectators watch movies and relate to them.The story in 'Vivre sa vie' is pretty straight-forward and there are no explicit social or political messages as in other films by Godard or his colleagues. Nana (Anna Karina) is a young woman trying to build a path for herself in the Big City, failing, and sliding slowly on the slope of prostitution. The film follows her unsuccessful attempts to meet ends, followed by a decision that mixes innocence and reluctance to engage in the oldest profession, while keeping alive her ingenuity and desire to live her life. There is no moral hesitation and no risks assessment in what she does. Godard approaches what can be otherwise described as a descent in hell with an apparent phlegmatic approach, almost as in a documentary or as in what we call nowadays a docu-drama. This is reflected in the places he is filming (more or less chic areas of Paris) and in the selection of his actors - the pimps and the customers of the sex trade look no different than any of the other guys next table in the brasserie. There is only one violent incident in the story that could have been a warning about the dangers ahead, but it is dully ignored. The desire to live a good life prevails.The choice of the actress may have been quite obvious, as Godard had married Anna Karina the year before the film was made. The role may even have been written for her, but the way he directs the young actress is part of his manner of telling the story. Karina's Nana is beautiful and ingenue, she just makes her choice about the way she wants to live her life without awareness about the price to be paid. Is there a final realization of her mistake? Maybe she gets it in the last second of the film, but it's mostly to the viewer to draw the conclusions.There are so many cinematographic innovations in this film made at the beginning of the 60s that any list risks to be partial. Filming some of the dialogs without seeing the faces of the actors, using live and sometimes hand-held camera on the streets of Paris, inserting legal and documentary book texts to illustrate the decision of Nana at the key moment when her destiny takes a turn, using close plans of the actors faces to emphasize their feelings (some times with help from the wonderful music of Michel Legrand) are only part of these. I especially loved two scenes: the film in film screening of 'Jeanne d'Arc' which is a fascinating declaration of love for cinema, and the dance scene which predates by more than three decades what John Travolta will do in Pulp Fiction. No wonder, as Quentin Tarantino lists Godard as one of his idols. One element which may seem today experimental was not such actually - it's the black-and-white film - that was the period of transition to color, which still was expensive and - luckily - the young French new wave directors and their producers could not afford it.The final of the 12 chapters of the film includes a glimpse on the streets of Paris where people stand in line at the cinema house to see François Truffaut's Jules and Jim. A reverence to his colleague of generation who broke through a few years before, and whose fame Jean-Luc Godard was soon to equal.

osmangokturk watching this movie of 1962 in 2016, one should interpret and asses the movie accordingly. this may contain Spoiler . At first the story seems to be an usual story of a girl pursuing a carrier in cinema while falling to the prostitution. To me it is an in-depth analysis of a woman's life. the prostitution as an occupation is the medium to make this analysis. the scene where they missed the movie and she has to wait her boss talking to one of his friend and because she gets bored and the friend of her boss childishly tries to cheer her up, she dance is so innocent and breathe-taking.

tieman64 Jean-Luc Godard directs "My Life to Live" (1962). The film opens with a dedication to B movies, and so underdogs. Godard then hits us with a quote by philosopher Michel de Montaigne ("Lend yourself to others, but give yourself to yourself"), the importance of which becomes apparent later on."Life's" first moving images consist of close-ups of actress Anna Karina. These shots, which survey Anna's skull from the front and sides, are all truncated and prematurely silenced. Only when Anna is viewed from behind, her face hidden, does Godard's film finally proceed. The message is subtle: only when her private wants are denied, does this character's life unfold.Anna plays Nana, a young woman living in Paris. Poor, lonely and seeking escape, Nana allows herself to be seduced by a post-war France awash with money, billboards and glitzy cinema screens. The world will allow her to become an actress, Nana believes. And all will be fine.But Godard counters Nana's naivety. When Nana insists that humans have free will ("I raise my hand, I'm responsible!"), Godard slyly admonishes her with a parable about a chicken whose soul is revealed to be on the outside of its body. Behaviour, personality and human actions, then, are contingent upon the External. And the External, for a staunch Marxist like Godard, is shaped by economic systems.And so Nana is pushed into prostitution. She insists that this is a personal choice not influenced by economic and sexual shackles, a stance which immediately makes the ironically titled "My Life to Live" different from most films "about prostitution". For whilst most films simply pity prostitutes, Godard focuses on their complicity; they embrace their exploitation, deny that exploitation is even taking place, and believe themselves to be making rational career choices. Such are common beliefs under capitalism (the poor choose to be poor, the worker is free to choose his employer etc etc), which for Godard merely legitimise systems of abuse. Montaigne's command - "Lend yourself to others, but give yourself to yourself" - is thus seen to be an impossibility. The brain and body one gets back at the end of the day have already been irrevocably changed and colonised by the customer and employer. And with these changes, one's potentials are potentially stymied."My Life to Live" is filled with symbolism, clever juxtapositions and Brechtian techniques. Pin-ball machines, for example, point to both a cruelly deterministic universe and Nana's role as a money-for-pleasure dispensation unit. Elsewhere Nana watches Dreyer's "The Passion of Joan of Arc", a film in which a True Believer is crushed by patriarchal forces beyond her control. Godard uses the nature of Dreyer's film - silent cinema - as a comment on Nana's forced passivity, her exploitation, her misguided faith and ultimately her sacrifice. Another scene watches as Nana sits in a cafe observing happy couples as Jean Ferrat sings "Ma Mome". The song's about a lovely loser who is adored despite her failings. Godard's camera makes love to Nana's face and eyes as the song unfolds, a bit of tragic romanticism which climaxes when Nana uses the moment to "wilfully decide" to become a prostitute.Juxtapositions abound. One segment portrays Nana happy and in love with her new life as a prostitute. The following segment abruptly shows the opposite. Nana herself embodies duelling qualities. Simply for being human, Godard treats Nana as a work of art, something lovely and precious and special and worthy of exaltation and love. Nana is herself aware of her exhibitionist situation, constantly posing, teasing and eyeballing Godard's camera. But when a character reads a poem (Poe's "The Oval Portrait"), such adoration turns sour. The poem is about a lovely head which dies when an artist fixates on a replicated image of it rather than the real thing. Privileging fantasy, then, leads to various forms of neglect and abuse.Late in the film Nana meets a philosophical man in a cafe. He tells her that thinking leads to analysis paralysis and so an inability to quickly act. To mitigate suffering caused by inaction, humans are thus "predisposed to not think". This survival mechanism, the man argues, makes humans susceptible and blind to elaborate forms of exploitation. Language, a kind of lie, propagates these problems. Only by adopting a dispassionate and honest view of reality, the man implies, can human language and so behaviour become honest (and by extension capable of love in a humanitarian sense).Like Godard's "Breathless", "Life" ends with a parody of Old Hollywood gangster movies; Nana is comically gunned down and gets the Hollywood career she always dreamed of. The film's obsession with prostitution echoes Godard's other films, most of which see capitalism as being built upon meretriciousness. For Godard, we're all prostitutes, selling our bodies and our minds which, as Cartesian mind/body splits are a fallacy, ultimately amounts to the same thing anyway. Where "My Life" differs from these films is in its dry, almost bureaucratic portrayal of prostitution; sex as banal, state sanctioned, "humanely regulated" economic transactions.Aesthetically, "Life" is special. The film's mixture of avant-gardism and classical formalism (Godard uses heavy cameras and lots of dollies) is emblematic of the entire Modernist movement (Antonioni, Bergman, Pasolini, Kubrick, Herzog, Bresson, Fassbinder etc), cinema's greatest movement before its defeat by algorithms and banks. Fittingly, Godard, relative to wealthy bankers, once hoped to study anthropology. His film would prove an influence on directors like Scorsese and Tarantino, who'd steal its style but whitewash its politics, a kind of selective vampirism which would eventually kill the Modernist movement outright. The film finds Karina doing some of her best work; warm, tragic and never melodramatic (Godard's style undercuts melodrama). Little touches, such as Nana measuring herself with one hand or playfully dancing around a jukebox, show us the Nana that might have been.8.9/10 – Masterpiece.

Jackson Booth-Millard I found this French film in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, I wouldn't have known about it without being entered in the book, and I didn't know what to expect, but I hoped it would be worth it, directed by Jean-Luc Godard (Breathless, Alphaville, Pierrot Le Fou). Basically the story is told as twelve brief unconnected episodes, exploring the life of young beautiful Parisian woman Nana Kleinfrankenheim (Anna Karina). Nana is in her early twenties, she leaves her husband and infant son to try and achieve her ambition to become an actress, however without money she is forced to become a shop girl. Unable to enter acting, Nana slowly descends into the world of prostitution, in order to earn better money, she soon gets herself a pimp, Raoul (Sady Rebbot). He later, at an unspecified time, sells her to another pimp, during the exchange an argument breaks out between the pimps, Nana is caught between the crossfire and killed by gunshot. Also starring André S. Labarthe as Paul, Guylaine Schlumberger as Yvette, Gérard Hoffman as Cook, Monique Messine as Elisabeth, Paul Pavel as Journalist and Brice Parain as Philosopher, with voice narration from Jean-Luc Godard. Karina, also the director's wife at the time, gives a marvellous performance as the tragic unconventional heroine, the film is all unconventional, it is part of the New Wave, this was one of the first major films to have sex earning money, so it gained notoriety, there is the gangster element, it has good techniques of camera angles, and it is stylish in black and white, all together it is a most worthwhile drama. Very good!