Vivre sa vie: Film en douze tableaux (1962)

You can learn everything you need to know about filmmaking just by watching the films of Jean-Luc Godard. No other director has ever got such a knowledge on the potentialities of cinema. "Vivre sa vie" is not the best nor the most enthralling of Godard's work, but has all of his best traits, and it is a treat, to the eye, to the mind and specially to the soul. It has just twelve scenes (clearly marked by twelve intertitles with very interesting texts) and tells the story of Nana, a girl who works at a record store who wants to be in pictures, and who, to gain money, starts gradually to enter the world of prostitution. Never giving prostitution much thought (it is always treated as a matter of fact, something that all hooker-movies never did, before or after this one), Nana is living her life (vivre sa vie), and as all lifes, everything happens naturally and gradually. As typical Godard, the storyline is not straight and the power of the story is always given hidden in the matter-of-fact, and never by any climatic approach. His camerawork and sound montage will forever delight me, and he never ceases to experiment, from the opening where the entire dialogue is filmed with the actors with their backs to the camera, to a scene where sound fades and subtitles appear in homage of silent movies. But these shifts are coherent, don't ask me how (!), like in other of his films. There is also a dance scene in a billiard room (a brilliant anticipation of the the masterful coffee-shop scene in "Band a Part" from 1964), and various homages to various forms of art that try to answer to the meaning of life, from Dreyer's movie "La passion de Jeanne d'Arc" of 1928, to Edgar Allen Poe, to a long monologue by philosopher Brice Parain in the last but one scene. At the end, when Nana has some kind of sense of happiness in her whore-existence, the movie stalls a little and these philosophical discourses come in, but all comes to an ultimate shock in the final shot, the only climatic frame of the picture, with the word "Fin" suddenly breaking while we are still gasping by what has just happened. "Vivre sa vie" is Godard's take at the meaning of life without actually tackling it, except by his own unique, undeniably beautiful and technical, filming style. Not for all hearts, and if you want to know Godard maybe not the best first option, but a movie that all Godards fans (guilty!) will enjoy. And by the way Anna Karina is as beautiful as ever, her big eyes always piercing the camera, the screen, and straight into my soul.