MY LIFE TO LIVE Movie Review

Vivre Sa Vie
It's My Life

A woman (Anna Karina) struggling to pay her bills is evicted from her apartment and turns to prostitution. Jean-Luc Godard's probing and eloquent examination of sexual and social relations in the early 1960s is structured as 12 episodes in the woman's life, and it is directed and edited with a tender directness that is both complex and extremely lucid. The film is part documentary, part gangster melodrama, and Godard's attempts at distancing the audience from the action (with what Bertolt Brecht called “alienation effects”) don't succeed, because we're more absorbed by Karina's story than he may realize. There's no doubt that Godard is utterly fixated by the face of his star (to whom he was married at the time), but that obsession seems justified when absorbing the poetic street tragedy that unfolds around the character's abused and delicate heart. A beautiful, haunting, maddening film, brilliantly photographed by Raoul Coutard. Score by Michel Legrand (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg). Special Jury Prize, Venice Film Festival.

NEXT STOP … Pierrot le Fou, Band of Outsiders, Contempt

1962 85m/B FR Anna Karina, Sady Rebbot, Andre S. Labarthe, Guylaine Schlumberger; D: Jean-Luc Godard; W: Jean-Luc Godard; M: Michel Legrand. Venice Film Festival ‘62: Special Jury Prize. VHS FXL, NYF, DVT