Abandoning her husband and child, a woman from the provinces has aspirations to become an actress in Paris but quickly gives up this daydream when her money runs out. To make ends meet, she takes a job in a record store, but the pay is not enough to keep her landlady from evicting her. Desperate for money, she turns to prostitution and takes up with a pimp who offers her protection. In time, she falls in love with a compassionate client but when she attempts to break away from her current profession, tragedy strikes.

Presented in twelve chapters, My Life to Live (French title: Vivre Sa Vie [1963]) is Jean-Luc Godard's astonishing take on the whore with the heart of gold stereotype. He freely mixes documentary techniques with B-movie melodrama, references literary works by Zola and Edgar Allen Poe, pays homage to cinema landmarks like Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc, and employs an arsenal of technical effects to create his first fully realized masterpiece, one that successfully integrates his love of gangster films (Breathless), politics (Le Petit Soldat), and experimental storytelling techniques (A Woman is a Woman). It was also here that Godard perfected his rapid-fire editing style, which was to take a camera pan and fragment it into a series of jump cuts accompanied by the sound of gun shots.

It is hard to imagine My Life to Live without Anna Karina; in many ways, the film is a celluloid love letter to her beauty. Photographed at times to resemble Louise Brooks, Lillian Gish and Falconetti, Karina gives truth to the lie about the prostitute who offers her body but keeps her soul. Ironically, Godard would later state that he could sense the inevitable dissolution of his marriage to Karina during the making of the film. (They divorced in 1967.) But viewers are unlikely to perceive the director's love/hate relationship with his subject. Susan Sontag said it best when she called the film "one of the most extraordinary, beautiful and original works of art I know of."

Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Producer: Pierre Braunberger
Screenplay: Jean-Luc Godard
Cinematography: Raoul Coutard
Editor: Agnes Guillemot
Music: Michel Legrand
Cast: Anna Karina (Nana), Saddy Rebbot (Raoul), Andre S. Labarthe (Paul), Guylaine Schlumberger (Yvette).
In French with English subtitles
BW-85m.

by Jeff Stafford