Hmm. That is nothing like the experience of seeing this film. Take the breakup scene at the beginning. Nana and her husband talk at a cafe. In one exchange when he asks her if the new guy earns more than he does she responds with, "why should you care?" repeating it several times in different tones. He asks if there's something wrong and she explains she was looking for the right reading of the line.
Now, in any other French New Wave film from the time this could be a moment of whimsy, a cute assault on the fourth wall, but here Nana is asserting her daydream of being in a movie (while being in a movie). The cuteness is not the point. The point is that she is placing herself for us personally such that we'll recall it later in the film.
The scene is shot entirely from the rear view of both actors as they sit at the bar. You can see their faces if you really look in the mirror behind the bar but we are being denied a moment of conventional melodrama. Jean Luc Godard is possibly the least sentimental film maker in the history of cinema and his choice of showing an emotional moment between a married couple without their faces forces us to think of the way they are speaking to each other. The title sequence has already given us a series of profile shots of the insanely beautiful Anna Karina (and they could be mug shots or portraits, even head shots for auditions) and when we come to the breakup chat it's all admin.
Unsentimental doesn't mean unemotional, though. In a telling move, Nana is transported beyond her cinema date at sight of Rennae Jeanne Falconetti's magnetic performance in the Dreyer Film of Joan of Arc. Nana's tears are real (as were Anna's). Again, this is Godard stepping aside from the winking use of reference films he and the other Nouvelle Vague-ers would gleefully pepper their films with. Here it is solemn and foreboding.
When Nana is moves into the organised side of sex work it is not as a fallen woman but one driven there by circumstances. There is nothing of a saucy Jacques Brel nightmare to it. Over a montage of endless marches of tricks and workers through hotel corridors, Raoul, her pimp, explains the details of government regulation on the industry as well as his own stipulations in precise language and in a flat tone as though inducting a new employee in factory life and the workings of machines. At one end a hypocritical government and at the other a greedy and possessive criminal underworld, Nana, like all the other women in her position, is a product, a good and service. Godard's aim is not at the tragedy of a woman undone but an alienated worker in a capitalist market. Just there I've been more strident than the film about that but this film is subtler than I.
This is Godard's third feature film, after the canonical Breathless and the glorious love letter to his wife A Woman is a Woman (no, not even that is sentimental, it's actually a hilarious social comedy). For Vivre sa Vie, Godard used a study of the sex work industry by a French magistrate (the direct source for Raoul's induction dialogue with Nana) as well as the nasty horror vignette The Oval Portrait by Edgar Allen Poe (read out almost in full in a later scene).
Godard's politics, already on the left, were to lean further and further with each passing year of the '60s until, by Tout va Bien, ten years later, his hard line Marxist Leninism was streamlined into something more (but only a little more) culturally palatable for a mass audience. Vivre sa Vie is the point at which the auteur began to differ from the others in the New Wave and it became a direct driver on his approach to cinema. Four years later in Two or Three Things I Know About Her when he revisited the theme of sex work, characterisation was used only as a means of adding a layer to what was effectively an essay on consumerism.
Nana's conversation with the middle aged "reader" in the cafe where they discuss spoken language and pure thoughts (far more entertaining than that sounds) is a lot like Brecht's notion that actors should quote. Brecht's barrier-breaking ways come calling in all of Godard. When Nana pauses to gaze out at us, there is only a moment where we feel the pull of her beauty before the awkwardness sets in. This is the kind of movie that you have to think about while you're in front of it, not just after over a coffee.
Happily, not only is this film unabashedly gorgeous with Raoul Coutard's sumptuously deep monochrome cinematography, Michel Legrande's powerful baroque score, Godard's persistent denial of service when he turns the sound off (arresting every time it happens) but the warmth of the performances. Anna Karina yet again shows credibly how Nana keeps her spirits afloat with turns that, in another life, she could have used in Vaudeville. Her dance to the rock instrumental in the pool hall will be only just eclipsed later with the Madison in Bande a Part. The quick self height measurement is as endearing as it is practical. If she pouted in A Woman and never does here it is not to the cost of the humanity both bright and distressed that she invests in Nana.
I saved this one for last this year in observance of Godard's passing this year. It's a good choice for his commemoration. If the later more severe and difficult movies turn you off and the early ones strike you as too cute try this for the anger in it that was expressed as warmth, the sense that all artists prostituted themselves for career (and he didn't leave himself out of that) and the sheer boldness of a film maker who, still new to it, was breaking even his own boundaries to say what he needed to say.
