A Week of Vivre Sa Vie @ SIFF Cinema

SIFF Cinema's Jean-Luc Godard celebration continues with 1962's Vivre sa vie, showing today through August 28. The mysteriously lovely Anna Karina stars as Nana in this--for the hermetic Godard--popular film about an aspiring young actress's secondary career choice: she becomes a prostitute.

Godard is as much a critic as auteur; he keeps a critical distance from his own films. Here, the story is chopped into twelve segments, fighting any sense of cinematic immersion with a documentary's flat stare. He is also an historian, who sees his films as added pages in his personal Big Book of Cinema. Conversely, film references are common in his work--they're like hyperlinks before their time. In Vivre sa vie, Nana goes to see Maria Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc. For an obsessive like Godard, the effect is of a starkly emotional outburst--but for the casual everyone else, it's a pretty young woman watching a sad, silent, black-and-white film.

In Against Interpretation, the cerebral Susan Sontag, who liked Vivre sa vie quite a lot, argues that Godard only wants to prove that something happened, not tell you why. He doesn't explain, he lets the film roll.

Nana is not necessarily forced into prostitution, there's no particular first-act gun that goes off: Nana's "passion" is to become a free agent, to throw off bourgeois, girlish dreams and become responsible for herself. Prostitution (at least in Godard's cinema--and in his cinema, most other acting is prostitution) demands a personal responsibility and detachment, a perspective that's similar to Krishna's, advising Arjuna before the war. On the one hand, there is the pressure of your environment; on the other, you can choose to act.

Says Sontag: "That freedom has no psychological interior--that the soul is something to be found not upon but after stripping away the 'inside' of a person--is the radical spiritual doctrine which Vivre sa vie illustrates." She chides Godard only for letting subtext slip in, in a reading from Poe's "The Oval Portrait" (since Godard was married to Karina, briefly, she feared people would "understand" the film as a fatalistic view of their relationship). She calls it a failure of nerve, and she's probably right. It's not easy not to look for explanations.