The Orthodoxy of Pimps: Godard’s “Vivre sa vie”

I’ll say it now: Jean-Luc Godard is one of the greatest and occasionally impenetrable filmmakers of our the last sixty years. Gee, that’s a hot take; but it is a lead into something else.

As dense (or convoluted or both) as much of his mid-career works can be, his early works up through 1968 (my cut-off for my patience begins with “Sympathy for the Devil”), style and polemic matched perfectly out of the gate. Godard doesn’t get enough credit for something else though: as much as he’s regarded as a primarily “intellectual” or cerebral auteur, he does have fun and obviously, feels strongly about the tales he’s telling. 

It couldn’t be otherwise. He’s a fan of film as much as anyone and he brings his love of a well told tale into play repeatedly. From “A bout de soufflé” through “Une femme est une femme”, “Vivre sa vie”, and others, there’s a kind of fun that accompanies his work as if to involve the audience,  as well: “look what we’re doing!”

It’s too easy to get lost in discussion about cinematic technique and the collage aspects of Godard’s approach to narrative, but that might be because few have done it as well, and none have done it better. Nor is Godard so impenetrable as he’s made out to be; to be sure, he demands interpretation and engagement with his ideas, but you can watch those films earlier in his career (particularly those he made with his then-wife, Anna Karina, for the story itself and not feel like you’re missing something. 

That said, I enjoy much of Godard from this period for those ideas, for the allusive richness in his narratives. 

Of course, Godard could be “clever” to a fault and lose himself up his storytelling asshole, but mostly, the ideas he was working with (and continues to work with) are so worthwhile that he can be forgiven for being overly cute with his wit and metacommentarial techniques.

I watched “Vivre sa vie” after decades and it holds up beautifully as the tale of a young woman’s descent into prostitution and as an observational polemic about the commodification of women specifically and the assignation of value to life in general in a capitalist society. That said, it’s free of Godard’s more heavy-handed use of Marxist jargon that would kill interest in later works. 

It helps, too, that Karina is luminous in her role as Nana, a latter-day incarnation of Louise Brooks that already sets up Godard’s homages to cinema itself. In some ways, “Vivre sa vie” could well be his reinvention of Pabst’s “Pandora’s Box” starring Brooks from thirty odd years before. 

Aside from sharing the bobbed haircut, Nana and Lulu are both two women caught in dire straits and plunged into prostitution to earn enough money to survive. And both are undone by the commodification and transactional nature of their lives in the business. Nana is, however, of a more Sartrean bent than her predecessor; she assumes responsibility for her actions and her scene in a diner with Brice Pelain would be peculiarly out of place in any other film or time.

She declares that if she moves her head one way, she is responsible, if she moves it in another, she is responsible, and so on(1). But Godard does call this into question; the movie ends tragically and one wonders how responsible Nana is for what becomes of her; when Raoul, her former pimp has traded her off to another, more malevolent “manager” later, you have to question how far one can be held for the machinations of others over your life. 

If I had an issue with the tragic nature of Nana’s end, it has to do with the unnecessary nature of it. It feels almost gratuitous and for someone like Godard, oddly “moralizing”. That is, until you realize that if he is moralizing, it’s not about Nana’s “descent” into sex work; it’s very much about how human relationships are reduced to transactions and surfaces through a network of causality that is specific to societies driven by profit and competition. In this sense, Nana is no less a martyr than Jeanne d’Arc, whose cinematic epitome in Dreyer’s masterpiece is directly referenced. 

Both Nana and Dreyer’s Jeanne are destined to meet their respective ends at the hands of men for whom both each woman is at the very least, an inconvenience and at worst, threatens the status quo. 

When Nana decides to move in with her lover and seems to have found a degree of happiness, you sense the doom right away when she says she’s going to tell Raoul that it’s over. Things never end well when a prize hooker declares her independence. 

One might say that this is a far cry from Jeanne’s declaration of her acceptance of her fate; but it is very close to the same thing. The thesis could be made - and has been, I’m sure - that regardless of the scope or type of ardor that each woman espouses, what is actually being spoken is their desire. Not just of God, or a man, but simply desire. In that desire is a will to freedom and agency, and this cannot be sanctioned by the orthodoxy fo the church or, well, the orthodoxy of pimps. 

It’s also worth considering that the “orthodoxy of pimps” might not be a bad metaphor for a society at large that regards feminine autonomy as a threat. 

There are other moments in the film that speak to Godard’s and Karina’s relationship. Her lover reads “The Oval Portrait” by Poe aloud to here (from Charles Baudelaire’s translation - retranslated back into English?) that he chose as a mirror to his and his wife’s actual relationship. This is just one of those elements of meta-commentary that Godard was so adept at weaving into his work. 

We are often stuck in the conversation of how much autobiographical elements play into any given work, but in this instance, as in many similar moments in Godard’s work, those elements are more integral than at first might be thought. I don’t think Godard was necessarily intent on inserting these allusions to impose his personal story on the larger narrative at hand as much as he uses them as a kind of authorial commentary. 

For all that Godard is often regarded as the deconstructive/destructive bad boy/enfant terrible of the French New Wave, that only works in regard to his cinematic technique and his interrogating the narrative. In this work, and others of the era, he is very much constructing narratives and approach to narratives that are more “reconstructive”. They hold together in their fragmented and fragmentary editing. 

In “Vivre sa vie”, the film is broken up into twelve chapters. Each chapter title appears reminding us that we’re watching a segmented tale, most emphatically, a movie; and at the same time, Godard is inviting similarities to the Silent Era with those title cards. The layers of reference stack nicely over the course of the film. From Nana’s bob to the title cards and even discrete compositional set-ups throughout the film, there is persistent meta-commentary about the nature of cinema, that cinema’s history, and a kind of throughline of examining the places of individuals within any given narrative or societal framework. 

Nana: The more we talk, the less the words mean.

It’s a gas. Honestly, as much as Godard does invite analysis (apologies to Sontag, but I think she misses the point of what Godard did at the time - and still does); his questioning of the value of language and its place in thinking is raised in the conversation between Nana and the philosopher explicitly, but you sense it narratively in how the conversations between characters are filmed throughout. Often, speakers are shot from behind. When we first meet Nana talking to the father of her child - both of whom she has left - both are filmed from behind at a counter, but we see Nana’s face in the reflection of the mirror behind the counter. 

In addition to the conversations between characters and for that matter, with the history of cinema, there is a direct dialog with one of Godard’s contemporaries and it’s a nod that could take us down another path. In one sequence, driving past a movie marquee, the film advertised is “Jules et Jim”, Truffaut’s masterpiece that also ends in the heroine’s death. Of course, in that film, Truffaut’s concerns are different from Godard’s but I can’t help but feel that the inclusion of this scene was a quiet missive from one friend (as they were at the time) to another.

In many ways, film becomes in this case a fun-house of nested reflections. Of the characters, for sure, but of the audience as well; we become implicated in the proceedings and are invited to question the value of not just the actions of the characters, but of our own. Are the choices we make any more or less important or vital to our ends than were Nana’s? 

With Nana’s declaration of her agency and her responsibility, we begin to grasp at the depth of how it is that we make our lives through our actions and invest them with meaning through reflection. Nana makes a strong and unsentimental case for love as the foundation and goal of existence(2). For a moment, this could be taken as cynical from a director as cerebral as Godard, but I don’t believe it is. There’s a distinct honesty in Nana’s words and I wouldn’t be surprised if Karina and Godard discussed Nana’s motivations at great length.

There is a world of cinematic technique that could lay the groundwork for hundreds of graduate theses (probably has). The use of voiceover documentary narration regarding the history of regulation of prostitution in France is set up as questions posed by Nana to an offscreen respondent. The panning over a street scene that seems framed by record and other wares on the street while characters continue their discussion lends an almost phenomenological cast to such scenes. Perhaps a casual aside to the likes of Alain Resnais and Robbe-Grillet? This is repeated throughout and then the script flips when we see a character - most often, Nana - facing the camera and answering questions, backlit in natural light and quietly expressing a subtle range of emotion.

Nana just wanted to be an actress or did she? Her initial stated goal was to make it in movies, but just how seriously? She was in a play and had a part in a movie with Eddie Constantine(3) but two things come to mind: one, did she really? Two, the more she mentions it to people, the farther away it becomes, the more it recedes into the land where dreams dissolve upon awakening. 

Likewise, her fall into poverty seems to have begun with a debt that one of her co-workers owes her of 2,000 francs. Even that seems more like a fantasy; she asks everyone for 2,000 francs but we learn later that she has exhausted her advances at her work at a record store, so we may conclude that she is profligate with money. 

The usual phrase used in the commentarial, analytical, and review materials of “Vivre sa vie” is “her descent into prostitution” (and yes, I used it here, as well) and this brings to mind another the possibility of another interpretation; if we take Nana at her word, i.e., that she alone is responsible for her actions and by implication her decisions, then she at least, doesn’t see her chosen field as something she descended into. Godard is refreshingly non-judgmental about sex work but the choice to make his heroine a prostitute is loaded with commentary on society in a larger context. 

Godard repays repeated viewings in a way that few other directors do. The explosion of geniuses in Europe in the fifties and sixties reflected a similar explosion of the times in the post-war world where values were being rethought. We are in a similar period and there may be more cinematic voices than ever from all over the world. Few are heard from to any degree here in the United States and of course, Jean-Luc is safe now because he’s part of the great post-war canon. 

Of course, he’s not safe. Not really: if his films were widely seen and had any degree of popularity, we’d be living with vastly different cinematic universes. We could use more unsafe directors; they are few and far between and perhaps, always have been/will be. 

A note on the title. In English, it has been variously translated as “Live her life”, “Live my life”, “Her life to live”, and so on. The infinitive is pretty obvious, so were I called upon to translate it, I’d use either “To live her life” or using the not unusual grammatical reversal “Her life to live”. In either case, it’s Nana’s life. Let her live it.

Louise Brooks as Lulu in Pabst’s “Pandora’s Box”

Anna Karina as Nana in Godard’s “Vivre sa vie”

Maria Falconetti in Carl Dreyer’s “La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc” (1929)

Karina: the emotional resonance between the two is more marked in the film, but perhaps this still gives some idea of that resonance.

Footnotes

1. This is directed at Elizabeth earlier in the film, but it shows Nana to be well up on her Sartre.

Nana: I think we're always responsible for our actions. We're free. I raise my hand - I'm responsible. I turn my head to the right - I'm responsible. I'm unhappy - I'm responsible. I smoke a cigarette - I'm responsible. I shut my eyes - I'm responsible. I forget that I'm responsible, but I am. I told you escape is a pipe dream. After all, everything is beautiful. You only have to take an interest in things, see their beauty. It's true. After all, things are just what they are. A face is a face. Plates are plates. Men are men. And life, is life.

2. Just another aspect of Nana coming to the point:

Nana: Shouldn't love be the only truth?

The Philosopher: For that, love would always have to be true.

3. Interestingly, a couple of years later, Karina would be in a film with Constantine, “Alphaville” (another one of my favorite Godards).