Rating of
3.5/4
The emptiness of life.
memento_mori - wrote on 09/29/13
If you want to get into French cinema, Vivre sa vie is not a bad place to start.
There's much in this classic to analyze and watch over and over again, so I understand why so many love it. I don't think it's Goard's masterpiece, but I think it's something special.
Nana and the people that surround her are some of the most interesting characters I have ever seen. Not all of them seem to have a certain goal or story, but they are connected to her somehow.
The tableaux in this film are perfect. I don't know how else to describe them, it's just the simplicity of Godard's direction that helped further the plot every bit in this sense.
Some of them don't even have a direct purpose. One consists of her just getting a record for a customer at the shop she works. That's it. It shows us how's she's living her life at first, and later we get her actual fate.
The way music is used in this film is almost alienating. To me, it felt like music was only an element to fill the silence, thus furthering the effect of emptiness in the movie. It's quite brilliant if you think about it. It's a component of Nana's life, but not in huge ways. Just features and explanations of how what she thinks about, if she likes her life at the moment.
I think the ending needed some closure. It's a little ironic to say that, considering what happened to her, but the ending felt very quick and done with. It needed a little more to truly be as unforgettable as some of the other scenes in the film were.
Quite an amount better than Á bout de souffle, Vivre sa vie just struck some kind of connection with me. I could identify with the main character, I understood the intentions of the script and the direction was great as always.
