My Life To Live

Anna Karina is Nana, a young woman who decides to abandon her husband and child to pursue a career as an actress. Sadly, things don’t go the way she planned, and soon enough she is forced to become a prostitute, working closely with not-so-savory characters. Will she be able to cope with this lifestyle, or will she end up with a bullet in the body?
I’ve always been a bit conflicted when it came to Jean-Luc Godard. I hate Breathless and The Little Soldier, I consider them to be anti-cinema in the worst way and to be dreadfully boring. However, I love A Woman Is A Woman, Contempt, Pierre Le Fou and Band Of Outsiders. I also love this film. Why I love it is not just because of the interesting and tragic story, or the beautiful Anna Karina who was always easy on the eyes, but because of the filmmaking style. You see, there is a lot of stuff that is done on purpose to alienate the audience. Seeing the back of the character’s heads in dialogue scenes, cards that signal the start of the scene, purposeful bad lighting, looking at the camera, etc. Some of you may read this and find it as a negative, but I feel it to be very important, as the disconnection with the traditional film story medium is also a way to see the disconnection our lead has from reality. She strongly believes she is going to make it, even at her worst moments, as if a security blanket. I found this film to be very moving and very beautiful, sort of a misfit’s story about chasing a dream that you know will not come true. And as always, Godard’s film talks about the medium in itself, making us aware that we’re watching a film, and not trying to convince us that we’re in an alternative reality as more traditional films do. The scene where Anna Karina cries while watching Dreyer’s Joan Of Arc moved me so much that I started crying myself. Truly remarkable.