Janae Milner
Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.
Kamila Bell
This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.
Scarlet
The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.
elvircorhodzic
MY LIFE TO LIVE is a drama about the degradation of a young life.A beautiful Parisian in her early twenties, leaves her husband and their son hoping to become an actress. She's a rebellious young woman who is prone to delusions. She elects to earn money as a prostitute. Soon she has a pimp, however, she meets an intelligent young man ...Mr. Godard has showed us the life of a young woman in the 12 short episodes. She has got a scar on her body or her soul in each of the episodes. A young person who is on the verge of despair, wants a better life. However, like most of the characters from the French New Wave, she is looking for something that is not precisely determined.The dialogues are direct and filled with dark tones. A depressive attitude is an expression of sincerity in this film. A technique and frames are quite strange. I had an impression that the protagonists flee from a camera in certain scenes. The story is intimate but not a quite tragic. Close-ups of the face of the major actress leave a strong impression of confusion and ignorance.Anna Karina as Nana Kleinfrankenheim is a lonely woman, who is lost in her own pathos and her inability to adapt to the real world. She is an outsider and every new experience strikes a blow to her self-confidence. In the end, she is cute and helpless thing who found meaning (love), for which she will not have time.This is very interesting, but not convincing.
gavin6942
Twelve episodic tales in the life of a Parisian woman (Anna Karina) and her slow descent into prostitution.Godard borrowed the aesthetics of the cinéma vérité approach to documentary film-making that was then becoming fashionable. However, this film differed from other films of the French New Wave by being photographed with a heavy Mitchell camera, as opposed to the light weight cameras used for earlier films.While not being one of Godard's best-known films, Vivre sa Vie enjoys an extremely positive critical reputation. Susan Sontag, author and cultural critic, has described Godard's achievement in Vivre sa vie as "a perfect film" and "one of the most extraordinary, beautiful, and original works of art that I know of." According to critic Roger Ebert in his essay on the film in the book The Great Movies, "The effect of the film is astonishing. It is clear, astringent, unsentimental, abrupt." This is, indeed, beautifully shot, and the literary references are quite interesting. A story of women's independence and prostitution mixed with Edgar Allan Poe? That is most unusual. The central idea of the Poe story resides in the confusing relationship between art and life. What does this mean in the context of the film?
Rob Starzec
"Vivre Sa Vie," translated roughly as "My Life to Live" follows a woman who slowly descends from being in a relationship to becoming a prostitute in order to get by. Such subject matter was, for the most part, not touched by Hollywood at the time of its release since it was very edgy and uncomfortable, and God forbid that Hollywood's audiences get uncomfortable when watching a film. But this wasn't Hollywood; this is part of the French New Wave.The film is told in 12 episodic tales which have titles and their own sections of the tale, such as certain Tarantino films including Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill, and Inglourious Basterds. For me, 12 seemed a little much, and it felt like it could have been done with a few of the episodes left out. I am not complaining about the length, it is still relatively a short movie, but I think I remember one or two episodes that were too short to be considered their own episodes in my opinion.I think it is great for Godard to work with such subject matter; the only "explicit" film I remember seeing from around this era was "Persona" by Bergman, and I was shocked at the language they used - I thought people were only that vulgar in movies towards the end of the 60s and onwards. However, there are shots that seem uninteresting, including the final shot of the film, and the final scene in general makes the film end on a very abrupt note.This is a good character study which has darker material than the mise-en-scene/lighting/tone of the film. I would have liked to see this darkness portrayed in the visuals, but this is still a good film.
Michael_Elliott
Vivre Sa Vie (1962)*** (out of 4) Jean-Luc Godard's tale of a young woman named Nana (Anna Karina) who slowly finds her desperate situation in life turning her towards prostitution to make some money. Once you see Godard's name then you know we're not going to get a straight story of a woman entertaining prostitution. Instead, the film is told in twelve chapters that really play out more like vignettes than anything else but I think this actually helps the film in a few ways. I've been quite critical with the director and several of his films but I think that style of his really doesn't go over-the-top here and for the most part it works. This is especially true in the first couple chapters where we see the woman's desperate situation and how she keeps waiting for a break to happen but of course it never comes. Godard's style of storytelling also works beautifully during a sequence where the woman is given all the information and rules about being a prostitute. This sequence here is perhaps one of my favorites from any Godard film I've seen up to this point. With that said, I found the final two chapters to be rather boring and to me they simply didn't fit in with the rest of the movie. I don't mind how the picture ended but chapter eleven takes place in a restaurant and has the woman talking to an older man. I'm sure some will get something out of this conversation but it just left me flat. I think the best thing working here is the performance of Karina who is simply divine in the lead role. It's hard to work your way through the director's style but Karina makes for a very believable role and actually makes you care about this woman and the trouble she's in. VIVRE SA VIE isn't something that I found to be a masterpiece but it is one of the better films I've seen from Godard.
