Jean-Luc Godard is one of the hardest filmmakers to like, films like "Breathless" and "Pierrot le fou" may not please many especially fans of blockbusters and even fans of independent films and different kind of movies, but Vivre sa Vie (or My life to live) is perhaps his most accessible and realistic work to be its most distinctive film, this film, Godard virtually sacrifices the type of cinema that made him a world cinema icon, but the Godard cinema can still be found on this film. Divided into 12 chapters (or "tableaux"), A young Parisian woman who abandoned her husband and son to try to be an actress in Paris, but with no other option, she becomes a prostitute. The film, unlike the other from the director, has little background music and a few dialogue's typical that director usually put in his films, he uses a realistic atmosphere and little pleasant showing 12 unconnected but salient parts, some a little depressing,of the life of this woman (Nana, played by Anna Karina, Godard's muse)while she is in Paris. The film addresses issues such as prostitution, disappointment and the difficulty of trying to live a new life and end up going to an even worse, the cruelty of fate, and various other themes in a realistic and little conventional way. Even if the movie has some depressing scenes, there are some funny and somewhat relaxed scenes. Sometimes, words do not say everything we want and then they disappoint us, the same thing as fate made with Nana.

VIVRE SA VIE was Jean-Luc Godard's fourth feature film. The protagonist Nana (Anna Karina) is a young Parisian woman who is not especially bright, but full of life and endowed with great beauty. Unable to make ends meet by working at a record shop, and unable to break into films as she dreams, she starts to work as a prostitute. Postwar French law permitted prostitution, with certain rules and regulations that the film explains in a documentary-like segment. Nana, who yearns to live her life according to her own desires, initially thinks that this new profession has set her free from cares. In fact, Nana's liberation from penury through prostitution only subjects her to new constraints imposed by her pimp and clientèle. The film, divided into twelve tableaux with fade-to-black transitions that quicken as it goes on (which one commentator compares to breathing faster and faster) brings us to one of the most shocking endings I have ever seen.This is a superlative film. Clocking in at 85 minutes, it lasts exactly as long as its story demands, with not a single moment that feels superfluous. Everything fits together, perfectly even things that ought to seem extraneous, the overindulgence of the auteur. Early in the film Nana goes to see Carl Dreyer's 1928 silent film "La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc", and this is not a mere gratuitous tribute to earlier cinema as is common in French New Wave films. Nana speaks with an elderly philosopher in a café, who is in fact the real-life philosopher Brice Parain whose dialogue here consists of his own writings, and yet this is not shallow intellectualism. Rather, these scenes increase the three-dimensionality of Nana as a character: not very intelligent and with negligible education, an easy woman since long before the film begins, but feeling strongly that there must be more out there.The believability of Nana as a character is increased all the more by Anna Karina's masterful performance. When coming to Godard's films, after the filmmaker has taken a beating from some circles, one might think that Karina was simply a beauty with no especial talent that enchanted the director due to her looks and foreign origin. Nope, the Danish actress here presents a completely believable Parisian airhead who is so easily moved by sentimental art.

During the 1960's, Jean-Luc Godard made fifteen feature-length pictures that owed themselves to the French New Wave movement, where young, "reckless" filmmakers made audacious attempts to defy the conventions of mainstream French cinema. Godard among many others decided to figuratively illustrate the book of common cinematic conventions and proceed to rip them up before concocting their own rebellious form of filmmaking, which, overall, seemed to want to hit the bases of reality's imperfections, coldness in story and characters, violence, and the physical and metaphorical chaos of modern society.Some of the above themes are what Godard uses to write and direct Vivre Sa Vie, a thought-provoking and consistently fascinating mood-piece, focusing on a woman by the name of Nana, played by the beautiful Anna Karina. Nana is a young Parisian twentysomething, aimlessly drifting through life after she leaves the safe but relatively unremarkable confines of her homelife, which involved a husband and a child. She's heavily strapped for cash, with her job as a shopgirl providing for what little income she already has, and soon realizes that leading a viable life on so little is just not a reality.She decides to take up life as a prostitute, which she'll earn better money doing instead of the day-in-and-day-out drudgery of being a shopgirl. She becomes the employee of Raoul (Sady Rebbot), your average pimp who takes advantage of Nana's youngness and gorgeous looks in order to turn a profit.Throughout the entire film, Godard conducts Vivre Sa Vie with pure, uneasy coldness, staging the picture into twelve separate chapters ("tableaus"). Each chapter, marked by a descriptive title-card, gives insight into Nan's particular stage in life at that moment in time and provides for a neatly-punctual little narrative that Godard smoothly orchestrates.Vivre Sa Vie ("My Life to Live" in English) seems like a film that would be made in present times because of its documentary-style filmmaking (more formerly known as "cinéma vérité"). More informally, the film bears a slice-of-life realism to it that is just beginning to gain considerable momentum in American cinema and only proves that Godard was ahead of his time, making a film like this in 1962.With the film's polished and clear videography, Godard strayed away from the hand-held-camera techniques of his earlier films such as Breathless and his final New Wave picture of the 1960's, Weekend. Godard uses what is known as a Mitchell camera to capture his carefully-framed and elegant shots that point where few cameras have pointed before. Godard continues to defy normalcy by pointing the camera at places uncommon, such as the back of Nana's head while she's speaking in conversation, or allowing the camera to hold in place during one long shot. Godard's camera techniques are aplenty and his ambition is most often met with an unexpected and very pleasant success.Furthermore, Godard knows how to write meaningful, sometimes philosophical dialog that finds ways to be hugely relevant and even deeply-contemplative. Consider the scene where Raoul tells Nana the value of a prostitute, detailing her job description and her role as a woman without many rights and robbed of her individuality and her humanity. She's a piece of meat for lonely men searching for a quick sexual fix that often finds ways to be completely unsexual and unromantic. Raoul illustrates this idea of what it means to be a prostitute in the coldest, yet most fitting way possible.Another conversation comes near the end, where Nana meets a random soul in a diner and strikes up a conversation. The man turns out to be a deeply thoughtful and wise man who seems to be looking for simple human companionship. Him and Nana have a delightfully philosophical conversation, showing that even two people who've never met one in another in their life possess the ability to connect with each other on an unexpected personal level, fulfilling one another in ways they never found foreseeable.Make no mistake, however, that Vivre Sa Vie is a cold and often detaching film that leaves little room for connecting with the characters in any way. After viewing four Godard films, three of which from the French New Wave, detachment seems to be an overarching theme for reasons I'm not sure I can adequately explain. Godard seems unable to allow his characters to be more than just unmoving littler pawns in his cinematic game. Despite giving Nana several traits and some debatable motives, even she has her own coldness to her being. At this point, I'm waiting for the film where instead of pushing us about a foot away from the film, Godard grabs us in and gives us a setting, an event, or a more fleshed out character to connect with.Starring: Anna Karina and Sady Rebbot. Directed by: Jean-Luc Godard.

'Vivre sa vie' has been my favorite film for a long time and I do not feel the need to write a long review explaining why I like this film so much. Instead, I would just like to say that for me, there are two ways of watching it: with subtitles and without subtitles. As I do not speak French, I need to use subtitles to follow the story, but I also like to watch it without the subtitles. Mainly because of its brilliant cinematography. The camera angles, the sets, the use of music/sounds and Anna Karina's undeniable beauty make this film interesting to watch even without paying any attention to the story at all. That said, the story is not worth any less than the visual beauty of the film.