My Life to Live (Vivre Sa Vie)

My Life to Live (Vivre Sa Vie)

1962

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Starring: Anna Karina, Sady Rebbot

My Life to Live is an early yet wholly realized entry by Godard in the French New Wave style.  I’m not really a fan of the French New Wave, and I’m definitely not really a fan of Godard, but I find My Life to Live rather captivating.  It’s Godard before Godard went off the cinematic deep end, and honestly, if I had to recommend a film to start Godard’s repertoire with, it would be this one. 

Told in twelve distinct tableaux, each with their own oddly antiquated title card, My Life to Live is about the young Parisian woman Nana, an aspiring actress.  Nana (Karina) opens the film by breaking up with her boyfriend, Paul, but he was helping to support her; her job at a record store doesn’t pay her well enough, and on her own, she soon descends into prostitution.  A run-in with an old friend who is also a prostitute introduces her to a pimp Raoul (Rebbot) and she all too easily seems to adjust to “The Life” (part of a play on the title of the film).  In parts of certain episodes, she acts happy, but it doesn’t take a stretch of the imagination to realize she isn’t, and Nana’s doomed existence seems a matter of fact.

 

Godard was married to Karina when he filmed My Life to Live, and I think it shows.  The way the camera moves around Nana, chronicling her life through her viewpoint, and yet always somehow exhibiting Karina’s almost alien-esque beauty is a sign of this.  We get so many shots of her eyes, her mouth, her smile, her dark hair, her lithe frame, her profile.  Karina is luminous in this film, and I think I’m a little entranced by her here.  The camera is too, as it slowly pans back and forth, watching her as she talks to her pimp, or slowly zooms in and out on her face as she is talking to a friend. 

Speaking of the camera, there is an odd lack of faces in this film.  Take the opening scene where Nana breaks up with Paul.  The two are sitting at the counter in a café, but they are shot from behind.  We can see Nana’s face reflected in the mirror behind the counter only slightly, but we have no such reflection of Paul.  Nana’s head moves, we know she is speaking, but the voice that answers her is almost disembodied.  Other characters in the film get similar treatment.  Nana listens to her friend recount how she started in prostitution, but it is about Nana listening and not the friend, as we rarely see her during this conversation.  Godard foregoes two-shots in favor of clearly focusing on Karina as much as possible.  When we do occasionally see the full face of another character, it is brief and almost surprising because we have gotten used to the backs of heads.  

 

Significantly, the one character who gets the most face time in the film is an “extra,” French philosopher Brice Parain.  Nana strikes up a conversation with him in a café when she is well-ensconced in her career of prostitution, but she quickly moves from trying to hit on him to simply discussing life with him.  In this conversation, we focus far more on Parain, who talks about thought and life and love and age, with Nana only occasionally joining in.  Because the camera focuses so much on Parain, perhaps this is saying that this man, this conversation, is one of the few moments in her life where Nana can focus on something other than herself.  Perhaps the camera focuses so squarely on Nana, to the extent of even blocking out other characters, in the rest of the film to show Nana’s self-centered nature.  But here, in this conversation, she is entirely present and paying attention to what someone else has to say.  It’s a significant moment for both her and the film, as it precipitates a change in her approach to prostitution.  After this conversation, sad Nana tries to break free from The Life, an attempt that clearly spells her doom.

 

The music is an interesting choice in My Life to Live, and just another example of Godard’s philosophy that film should be self-aware.  There is a beautiful and incredibly sad sixteen bar theme that was written for the film, but that is the only piece of soundtrack score we ever hear.  Occasionally it repeats and we hear it for more than a minute or so, but most of the time it comes in and simply plays the sixteen bars, then stops just as abruptly as it starts.  We expect more, we want more, but Godard reminds us this is a score and not actually part of the events taking place on the screen, so why should it extend the length of the scene?  I really hesitate to even call it a score or soundtrack, but it is a very lovely theme for a film.

Prostitution is treated with tremendous alienation in My Life to Live, essentially mirroring how Nana feels about what she’s doing.  In the coldest segment of the film, Nana asks her pimp what “the rules” are regarding rooms, hours, fees, police regulation, and even abortions.  It’s downright clinical, and through what is easily the shortest of the twelve parts of the film, Nana descends wholly into her “life.”  The sex is clearly not shown (this is 1962 after all), and there is no glamour.  Just as the Paris we see is littered and cheap, the sex is cold, almost utilitarian.  There is no titillation about Nana’s profession, but neither is there a sense of yawning depression about her lot.  It’s simply there, a banal, boring fact of Nana’s life.

 

As Nana is the clear focal character of the film, it’s odd that although I like her, I don’t love her, nor do I feel much sympathy for her, and yet that doesn’t stop me from rooting for her.  Her life descends quickly at the beginning of the film into her situation, but she is also a bit cold and cruel.  When she breaks up with Paul in the opening scene, she’s downright awful, and it’s a bit disconcerting how quickly she seems to adjust to prostitution.  Is she likeable?  I’m really not sure.  And yet, on her side, she is moved to tears at the cinema by an intense scene from The Passion of Joan of Arc, she is fascinated with the philosopher, and despite her headstrongness taking her into the existence it did, she does not deserve her doom.  To me, the final two “chapters” of the film make up its emotional crux.  Nana starts to awaken from her existential stupor, but just as she does, she is stricken down by the trappings around her, bound to the life she has unwittingly buried herself in.  It’s tragic, it really is.

Accessible in terms of a straightforward narrative yet inventive in terms of film philosophy without being absolutely insane, My Life to Live is a good starting place for Godard.

Arbitrary Rating: 8/10

To Kill a Mockingbird

To Kill a Mockingbird

1962

Director: Robert Mulligan

Starring: Gregory Peck, Brock Peters, Mary Badham, Philip Alford

I’ll start this one with a bit of a shocker: I’ve never read the novel To Kill a Mockingbird.  Somehow, in my high school years, I managed to miss that one particular piece of definitive American fiction.  Perhaps that helps me, though, in examining the film; I’m untainted by what is usually perceived as a negative experience of “having to read” something for school.

Atticus Finch (Peck) is a small town country lawyer in 1930s Alabama.  His two young children, Jem (Alford) and Scout (Badham) watch their father with reverence and awe as they go about their typical childhood shenanigans.  Things get serious, though, when Atticus is brought on to defend Tom Robinson (Peters), a black man, against an unfounded rape charge of a white woman, bringing in issues of race, class, and justice.

 

Although I haven’t read the book, I can say that the film of To Kill a Mockingbird seems a very potent adaptation.  It works well onscreen, with clearly drawn characters and a distinct narrative structure to the story, along with some fairly heavy-hitting social issues that manage to sneak in after the movie has lulled you into a sense of complacency.  As is the case with most films that focus on childhood recollections, there are many small episodes and no real overarching narrative thread to the film; however, the characters, especially Atticus, are strong enough to tie everything together in a satisfactory manner.

Atticus Finch, as portrayed by Peck, is easily the bedrock of the film.  It’s easy to see why the AFI named Finch the number one Movie Hero of all time.  Finch’s heroism is made all the more powerful by the fact that it’s less blatant and more troubled than most typical do-gooders.  Peck, as Finch, is quiet but self-assured, calm but passionate, and he even he can be pushed too far as seen in an utterly wrenching scene late in the film.  My favorite aspect of his performance is how understated it is; there’s a lot of subtlety in Atticus.  I haven’t exactly exhausted all of Gregory Peck’s filmography, but after revisiting him in this film, I’d be hard-pressed to name a better performance of his.  Unlike many other actors of his generation, (like Cary Grant) I don’t see this role as Peck simply playing some aspect of Peck.  No, this is a fully realized performance; this is not Gregory Peck, this is Atticus Finch.  

 

Movies that focus on child actors tend to live or die by the performances of the children.  Scout and Jem are solid performances; not the best child actors I’ve ever seen, but solid.  Alford as Jem is fairly typical child actor performance, solid but not amazing, but Badham as Scout was very good.  In terms of speaking the lines, she was essentially like any other child actor (re: acceptable), but it was her physicality that set her apart.  Badham’s Scout is all tetchy movements, elbows and knees, squints and sly smiles that she can’t seem to help.  The scene where Scout is reading in bed with Atticus is a perfect example; Badham doesn’t have extensive lines, but it’s the way she handles the book, the way she stretches, the way she touches the watch with eager, awkward fingers that just feels perfect.  Intentional or not, these are the marks of reality and helped make her performance in particular work so well for me.

 

To Kill a Mockingbird has been described as a gothic film in terms of its approach to the mysterious beliefs that children concoct for themselves.  Removing the courthouse drama episode from the film (which is discussed below), there is definitely a dark fairy tale tone to the story that puts To Kill a Mockingbird in the same family as Night of the Hunter.  The difference of the father figure sets these two films apart – one pure evil, one pure goodness – but the tones are similar.  The fright of Boo Radley’s house, the wonder at discovering the trinkets in the tree, the invented stories, and the terror of the final battle in the woods; they all have an air of surrealism to them, a dark magic that nicely coincides with traditional (re: not Disney) fairy tales, one often helped along by terrific camerawork.  

To Kill a Mockingbird seems to me to represent a fundamental shift in American filmmaking.  Although the late sixties are typically seen as the focal point for the change from “Classic Hollywood” to “Modern Hollywood,” due to, in no small part, the eventual influence of the French New Wave, the pumps had to be primed in order to accept that change.  To Kill a Mockingbird is a film that got Hollywood ready to change.  The episodes that deal with the gothic children’s tales of the original story are presented in a typical “Classic Hollywood” manner, but it is the sneakiness of the story suddenly warping into a wretched one of racism, bigotry, and intolerance, one that has more than one powerful punch to the stomach in store for you, that provides glimpses into the “Modern Hollywood” that would come a few years down the road.  The courthouse drama episode, easily the most memorable one of the film, stands head and shoulders above the rest of the story and is surprisingly fresh and gripping.  It doesn’t feel outdated in the least.  It is still potent and, unfortunately, still relevant.  There are certain expectations from a courthouse drama, and To Kill a Mockingbird manages to throw most of them on their head, a major reason why this film works as well as it does and why it sets the path for the new means of filmmaking that followed.  This aspect of the story is incredibly courageous in what it dared to do and show in 1960s America, a culture in the midst of a civil rights flashpoint.  

 

Distinctly episodic in nature, To Kill a Mockingbird is defined by its characters and its performances, and it is strong in both.  Although not a particular favorite of mine, Peck as Finch is fantastic and in my recent rewatch, I found myself rather unexpectedly in tears several times.  This is a film that rightly deserves to be remembered and passed on.

Arbitrary Rating: 8/10

Jules et Jim

 

Jules et Jim

1962

Director: Francois Truffaut

Starring: Jeanne Moreau, Oskar Werner, Henri Serre

I will now pull out what is to become my Standard French New Wave Introduction: Just because I can appreciate, objectively, how the films of the French New Wave advanced filmmaking in the sixties doesn’t mean I have to like the films themselves.  Because I don’t.  In my revisit of Jules et Jim, I remember vaguely having some affection for the film, but that affection began dissipating around the halfway mark of the film.  In a movie so much about three central characters, it is extraordinarily hard to like the movie if you cannot like said characters, a fact that’s even more grating when it’s incredibly apparent that I am *supposed* to like these three people.

In 1912 Paris, Jules (Werner), an Austrian, befriends Jim (Serre), a Frenchman.  The two form a fast bond and live a bohemian lifestyle together.  Enter Catherine (Moreau), the one woman who captivates Jules in a way the other Parisian women cannot.  But she captivates Jim as well.  As the years pass, Jim and Jules fight in World War I, Jules marries Catherine and has a daughter with her, but Catherine bores of their marriage and takes on many lovers, including Jim.  Her capriciousness and insatiability, however, cannot be contained.

  

Although it’s now been over a decade, I was reminded of reading and discussing D.H. Lawrence’s Women In Love in my freshman year of college while I was recently revisiting Jules et Jim.  The two share many thematic elements: complicated love affairs and strong male friendships are obvious, but also a sense of vast discontent with the world at large for pretty much all the characters.  They speak of true love and passions but with emptiness and spite, and view almost everyone else beside themselves as lesser beings whose feelings are not potent enough to matter.  And I had a very similar reaction to Women In Love as Jules et Jim.  These people are rather full of themselves and have an extraordinarily distorted bohemian sense of superiority that appears to be actively preventing them from being happy.

And that’s really my major reaction to the triangle of Jules, Jim, and Catherine.  These are people so utterly narcissistic they cannot ever be happy.  Jules is weak and so besotted with Catherine that he completely prostrates himself at her feet, letting her walk all over him and uselessly basing his own happiness off the scraps of attention she deigns give him.  Jim seems to be stronger than that, but he constantly vacillates back and forth between cutting himself free of his toxic attraction to Catherine and making a real life with someone else.  His inability to escape Catherine is frustrating to the last.  And then there’s Catherine herself, the instigator in all this mess.  Jules and Jim have a pretty decent bromance going until Catherine comes along and mucks everything up with her crazy ways.  Seriously, she’s crazy.  Initially, when we first meet everyone and they are young, her craziness – like jumping in the Seine on a lark – is passed off as a “wild and crazy” youth.  OK, sure, I completely understand the need, when one is young, to act out and do ridiculous things.  The problem is, Catherine never gets any better.  She never grows out of this and slowly eats away at Jules and Jim both with her dangerous impetuousness.  Even when she becomes a mother, she never acts like one.  I can understand that not all women are blessed with maternal instincts, but Catherine takes it too far.  

Look at them... they were so happy before Catherine came along...

The thing that bugs me the most about Catherine is that Truffaut essentially considered her “his ideal woman.”  How?  Why?  Because she’s a trifling narcissist who bends everyone around to her petty whims?  Is that REALLY your idea of an ideal woman, Truffaut?  I understand that Jeanne Moreau is beguiling and certainly has charisma, but Catherine is morally repugnant.  I like that Catherine is strong-willed, but she’s not strong-willed in a good way.  I guess I must simply arrive at the conclusion that my idea of an ideal woman differs greatly from Truffaut’s. 

In terms of the filmmaking itself, well at least it’s Truffaut, and Truffaut is easy to swallow.  Despite the rather ridiculous characters, we get some playing around as is the New Wave style.  A narrator is constantly telling us things both vital and unnecessary to the central story.  Truffaut underlines a point by randomly adding in subtitles in one scene, and he uses some stock footage of both Victorian prostitutes and Nazi book burnings at different points in the film.  It’s interesting, here, that we have essentially a French New Wave period piece, and the costumes of the 1910s, 20s, and 30s seem somewhat incongruous with the thoroughly modern techniques championed by Truffaut’s New Wave, but it certainly sets the film apart from its contemporaries.

"Hold on honey, let me clean my face before I ruin your life."

Unlike Truffaut or so many other critics, I never fell in love with any of the main characters.  I never found their struggles to keep themselves consistently unhappy and beaten down appealing (because really, that’s how they were behaving to me).  I do not see their story as romantic or charming at all, but one full of viciousness and toxicity.  And Jules et Jim is very much based on its characters.  Poor Jules and Jim, neither strong enough to know when to let go of the crazy bitch.

Arbitrary Rating: 4/10.  If Catherine is a manic pixie dream girl, then I don’t understand men.  Heck, I liked Godard’s wacko crazy Weekend more than this!!!