By Dr Karen Oughton
Naughty little
Nana stands in front of the camera. With her head in close-up, she poses: left,
full profile and then right. Throughout Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie,
the philosophising prostitute is both alluring and clinical, free-spirited and
forced, but despite her famous speech in the cafe (and being seen and perhaps
censured by capricious cinephiles) can she be held responsible for her actions
within the film
Godard’s piece (naturally enough for the New Wave) is a mixture of
different styles, as suggested by its teasing, nimble title, Vivre Sa Vie, which translates roughly
as “live life†and has been moulded variously into It’s My Life, My Life to Live and To Live Her Life across the territories. It suggests an approach mixing
direct cinema with cinema verite-style camera work to indicate a defiant,
almost decadent posturing that is nonetheless a delicate portrayal of its theme
and holds its truth in the quickest flecks of light caught on camera behind the
beguiling Nana. Indeed, Nana’s relationship with the camera changes from scene
to scene; she flirts with it almost as a client, forces herself on it when
dancing and is followed by it when fleeing terrified from the scene of a
shooting. The film’s subtitle is A Film
in Twelve Scenes. Simply speaking, it charts segments in the life of Nana,
a wife and mother who has left her family to tread the boards.
She aspires to life as an actress and it could be argued that she
subsequently spends most of the time fulfilling a series of roles, such as the
moll she becomes for most of the feature’s duration. From the opening frame, Godard goads us, makes us strain for the
meaning in her scenes, for the meaning of her mythos as a whole.
Following the frames in which we are given information about the film’s
festival-circuit run, the opening section is where Godard’s starlet seduces the
camera. Nana stands still, sometimes almost in silhouette. Her eyelashes are fluttering
and there are slight movements of her tender mouth and smooth throat as she
breathes. While an understated gesture, it is sexual, sordid even and oddly
uncomfortable for the viewer, so personal is the image that it reminds them of
their own breath and rhythmic deglutition. The music appears, then disappears
and we are denied Nana’s eyes as they are blotted out by obviously obtrusive
text in the titles. The referent paradox is clear: she is Miss X of the same
generation, one of the modern masses, yet a subject worthy of study and a
creature so captivating she must be periodically censored for her audience’s
own good.
The film is an exercise in illustrating the paradoxes of interpretation,
so much to consider, yet every element included is a potential deconstruction. Nana
is an appealing mix of style and naturalism, function and frivolity. Her short
hair makes her comparatively boyish (as she semi-acknowledges in her letter to
a potential Madam, stating that it could quickly be grown out), yet it also
shows off that sensual neck. From the opening scene where we only truly see the
back of her head and hair, bulky jacket and cigarette smoke, she may drink like
a man, play like a man and talk like a man, but she can also be moulded by a
man. She talks about her torturous life to her ex-husband, Paul, in the café.
We see their backs and note their similar shapes and the ferocity of fear for
her fate versus her desire to be seen as “special†by him. She acts in place of
his inaction. We are desperate for them to touch as shutting us out of their
conversation (as the framing does) makes us feel vulnerable too, all the while
praising Nana for her forward-thinking vehemence. Above all, however, her
hair’s sleek cut makes her look extremely functional, as underlined by her
clothes and chamber while working as a call girl. Nana has an innate glamour
that both enhances her sex appeal and sterilizes her environment.
Here is a girl who borrows her gestures from the gentlemen she galvanises.
Her head bobs with theirs on her bored, business-like but Byzantine journey;
while leading them often around the room, she also follows their lead when
allowing herself to be purloined for their pleasure. The easy, lazy angle of
her hand holding a cocked cigarette is her calling card and is the art of the
tart considering the inevitable conclusion of her next conquest.
Art or apparatus, Godard wants us to feel the grit under Nana’s shoes in
order to understand the poetry of the situation; she cannot appreciate the
responsibility she claims during the canteen scene as for her (an actress in
both senses) it must remain unsaid lest it becomes a piece of performed fiction.
As Susan Sontag states in Against
Interpretation, she’s there to be seen, not to explain, so we must fill in
the gaps for her. Against this interpretation, however, is our own
interpretation of that. As Godard changes his camera angles and plays with diegesis
we cannot help but imply an interpretation. According to Sontag, these are simply
snippets of a kaleidoscope, a section of discourse that relates to the
narrative frame but not to our assertive femme for whom (she feels) no
explanation is given. Yet despite Sontag’s clear investment in stating the
alternative, it becomes impossible not to see the implied implications of the
oddly innocent girl’s situation.
Indeed, Nana’s more masculine behaviour only serves to silhouette her
slightness and frailty. As Sontag comments, each one of the film’s twelve segments
recalls a text and, as the ‘text’ in the café sequence suggests, Nana’s story is
that of ‘The Chicken’, that which’s soul can only be found when she has given
of herself. However, this is not through negation of herself as Sontag suggests
– it is not exactly a process during which Nana has no control over the layers
that are stripped away, but it is controlled submission. We see Nana unburdened
in the scenes in which she drifts, when her smile shines brightly enough for it
to light up her eyes. This is when the body and soul of this little ‘chick’ are
peeled away and we notice Nana unconstructed, a Nana of pure feeling inside the
skin cage, a ghost inside the machine.
We listen to Nana and her lover discuss passages
of Poe and may think her mask is beginning to slip; despite the simple, clinical
setting alongside the business-like montages of our Mademoiselle and her men,
we begin to feel warmth. Nevertheless, this is hope for the future that feels
hallucinogenic, so far is it from the narrative’s precision-focused frame. Nana
has become a body, a sculpted doll not only in her looks but in her assertive,
masculine behaviour, so it is natural that this, too, must be discarded. This
occurs in our final sequence, wherein our miss is sold to another pimp. She is manhandled
across a bleak parking slot from man to man until she is shot. Her delicate
figure contrasts against the shaft of the gun, yet like it she has become
little more than a mechanism of male control, a cog in a wheel of a criminal
machine maintained by money and murder. Nana’s impregnation by the phallic
symbol represents a loss, a commercial union turned sour. Nana the machinic
mode of production has been decommissioned. To put it crudely, the bullet has
given her more holes than necessary for her occupation and has marked her. Particularly
in the cold, hard light of the modern-day chicks, she is simply an appendage
sullied, and therefore sullying by association, another man.
After her evisceration and an indelicate death
dance, therefore, she falls to the floor by the car.
It is here the viewer finally feels Nana in
a way that Sontag would probably support; we feel her precisely because we
don’t. As she lies lifeless in the street, her personality begs a playback the
fast-paced action will not permit. We watch in horror as first one car leaves
her, then the other half speeds towards her as though to crush the evidence of
her calamitous conclusion by driving straight across her and leaving a pool of
unbelievably black blood oozing and oscillating on the tarmac. Such is the
departure from the film’s abstracted gentility that the idea alone of this sort
of image – regardless of the film’s final fade before it becomes possible – remains
with the viewer. While Sontag complains bitterly that the bombastic director
destroys the thematic complexity of his piece by allowing Nana’s death to
mirror the parable of the ‘poule’, it actually seems to do the exact opposite.
It forces Nana to live in our mind’s eye. We recoil from the image despite the
fact it never worries our retinas. We instead see Nana in all humanity,
philosophy and beauty precisely because God(ard) deprives her – his muse and off-screen
wife Anna Karina – of it in those final few frames. By placing herself in that
scenario, she is given chance to bear her soul.
She is responsible.
Dr Karen Oughton is an academic and film journalist. Click here for her web site
(Viva Sa Vie is available as a special edition Blu-ray from Criterion. Click here to order from Amazon)