Production still of Vivre Sa Vie (1962). Source: Criterion Collection
I’ve always been frustrated with Jean-Luc Godard. If you aren’t a film geek or French Wave enthusiast, you have little means of grappling with his aesthetics and tend to feel like you missed the point by the end of the film. Well, buckle up dear readers, for today’s installment of Film Assignments from Another Life, as we tackle 1962’s My Life to Live with a pandemic-inspired coda.
The piece centers on Nana (Anna Karina, Godard’s first wife), a record shop worker who dreams of leaving her failed relationship and making it big in the movies, chronicling her descent into prostitution through twelve simply titled vignettes. We are the camera, panning through Nana’s world, trying in vain to absorb every detail and refocusing our attention when something new strikes our fancy. Oftentimes we lose sight of Nana as she slips out of frame or hides her face from the camera, or we catch only her fragmented reflections in the many mirrors present throughout the film. We are her companion as she cries through Jeanne d’Arc, writes a letter, and dances around a pool table. Although continuity is implied between the segments, we are only given these glimpses into her life and relationships, and along with Nana, we must search for her true self amidst the images.
Just as we can’t fully understand Nana with the few bits of information we have, the average moviegoer can’t fully understand the film without knowing a great deal about its creator and his artistic influences. Those who have caught up on their Godard gossip know My Life to Live is a project fraught with marital tension between director and actress. At the start of the final vignette, a young artist with whom Nana has fallen in love reads from Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Oval Portrait.” Godard provides the voiceover. He narrates the tale of a painter who creates such a vivid portrait of his wife that he kills her in the process, an apt metaphor for Godard and Karina’s relationship by the picture’s conclusion.
A Brecht fanboy, Godard employs his style of theatrical detachment as a means of understanding Nana’s plight rationally. The philosopher Nana encounters in the penultimate vignette iterates specifically this idea: “there’s a kind of ascetic rule that stops one from speaking well until one sees life with detachment…that’s why we pass from silence to words. We swing between the two because it’s the movement of life.” This navigating principle justifies many of Godard’s aesthetically unconventional choices, such as the fragmentary plot structure, emotional alienation of the main character, and blatant references to the artificiality of filmmaking. The first segment is laden with moments of reflexivity -- lines are repeated after cuts and Karina engages in a discussion of how best to deliver her line. On occasion, Nana’s reactions are contextually opposite; she laughs when insulted and suddenly breaks the fourth wall to gaze into the camera. The lateral pans and long shots mimic the staging of theatrical performance, another Brechtian reference to his origins in theater. But without this supplementary information, how is an uninformed viewer expected to grasp the essence of the film?
Maybe that’s just it. Maybe if you can’t get a full read on Nana, or you don’t really understand what Godard is trying to say, you’ve already understood him. No one can fully understand another, let alone himself, but that doesn’t mean there’s no worth or beauty in trying.
In the penultimate tableaux, the philosopher marvels that Plato’s books were written in ancient Greek and “no one really understands the language, yet something gets through.” Maybe the average moviegoer can’t understand Godard’s language, but in My Life to Live, what gets through is a fragmented, haunting, beautiful character sketch of a woman pursuing a dream and sacrificing everything to get it on the hazy streets of 1960s Paris. Our longing for a piece of Nana and our reaction to her stubborn elusiveness speaks to a deeper desire for human connection and understanding the people with which we share our little worlds.
What do I think about this assessment now, reading this in 2020? Talk about sharing our little worlds. Some of us document all the trials and tribulations of our socially distanced lives on Instagram or TikTok, acquiring likes of relatability or admiration. But most of us, I think, are like Nana: sharing something more cultivated to a small but devoted circle of friends or family, thinking that beauty shots and a dose of reflexivity is enough to shield the anxiety and loneliness we’ve all felt at least once in the past year. The thing is, when Nana shows us what’s really going on, even if she doesn’t mean to show it, her legitimacy is rendered as beauty to the hungry eye. Don’t give me perfection, or cultivated imperfection – who honestly has time for all that? It’s your life to live, too, so just come as you are.