Reseñas de la crítica

Godard, like Oshima, is a pillar of visceral, astringent filmmaking. In My Life to Live, his then-wife, legendary muse Anna Karina, shines as Nana, an aspiring actress who, instead of pursuing success in cinema, drifts into a life of vagrancy and prostitution.

Locked down from the first frame, the physical form of Anna Karina (playing the prostitute Nana) is Godard's greatest impenetrable object, his objective made clear by an eight year-old's poem: "take away the exterior and you have the interior. Takes away the interior and you see the soul." Photographed nakedly... and surrounded by a clean, bright mise-en-scène, Karina's visage poses a challenge, a Bressonian model totally Godardified.

La putain sacrée and how to photograph her, a twelve-part treatment. Start from the back and work inwards, says Jean-Luc Godard, Nana at the bistro counter is a Magritte obfuscation until a reflection in the background mirror reveals Anna Karina's pensive visage. "Take away the outside and the inside is left, take away the inside and you see the soul," a child's rewording of Montaigne.

Karina gives her most heart-clutching performance, which seems more like the apparition of a whole unknowable self in all its discreetly shaded moods, stalking through Paris like a cross between Louise Brooks and an exultant cat. So alluring and anarchic, Karina is not just a beautiful muse: a fabulously protean actress whose many transformations for Godard still feel strange and new, at play with the films themselves, mixing giddy abandon with gasping vulnerability.

This is among the most formal and composed of Godard's films, in its images and sounds, and in narrative construction. Godard was still some years away from the full flowering of his political consciousness, but already here a bleak view of society is developed: everybody the camera examines is actually or potentially either pimp, whore or client in this go-round of need and consumption.

On the one hand, it was devised and shot very quickly, almost in the manner of reportage. . . . On the other hand, this is among the most formal and composed of Godard’s films, in its images and sounds, and in narrative construction: episodes or scenes from a decline-and-fall melodrama, the content of which is labelled and spelt out in advance, in soberly Brechtian intertitles.

At times Godard is mimicking the tropes of documentary, at others he is relying on overt reference (Dreyer's THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC, for example), and at others he is doing what he does best (using framing and composition to make sure that no one present misunderstands the emotional distance a character feels). One would he hard pressed to find another film with such an abrupt and sad ending that still makes one leave the theater with a smile. Poetic, beautiful, and concise.

Whereas Breathless achieves the suspense of poetic gratuitousness, My Life to Live is dictated by the logic of poetic necessity. Godard's heroine is destroyed by the very terms with which she is defined... My Life to Live, by the very violence of the reactions it evokes, is the most profoundly modern film of the year.