To me, this movie is perfection.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

There is a bleakness to this movie, which has a pretty and thoughtful young woman (Anna Karina), living in beautiful Paris, and yet descending into prostitution following a break-up. Director Jean-Luc Godard gives us twelve vignettes that are intentionally simple and unassuming to paint the picture. It's worth seeing, but at least for me, there are better French New Wave pictures, and certainly less depressing ones.Anna Karina is lovely but I don't think she delivered a lot of range in this performance. One major exception early on in her new job is when she desperately tries to avoid a customer's kiss on the mouth. The look in her eyes as she squirms around is heart-rending, and disabuses us of any ooh-la-la fantasies we may have about her in this role. Another nice scene is when she dances to a jukebox song with awkward cuteness, trying to entice the few men watching her.To his credit, Godard is unflinching in his honesty, and there is no sentimentality here. I loved the thoughtful scenes, the one where she's in the theater watching the 1928 Carl Theodor Dreyer film 'The Passion of Joan of Arc', and then later picking an older man's brain about philosophy in a café. The street scenes in Paris were nice to see, though sometimes the film comes close to descending into a home movie project. Godard was making a point about the realities of life, and employing new filmmaking techniques while telling the story. It doesn't always make for great entertainment though, such as the section that's almost a mini-documentary on prostitution in Paris at the time. The ending is also ridiculously abrupt; it is a grand statement but to me borders on pretentiousness. Is it over-compensating for not showing some of the more painful aspects of prostitution along the way? (STD's, being beaten up, being degraded, etc?). Until then, with the exception of the attempted kiss scene, the 'insight' we get is mostly just a beautiful model being bored by her tricks. From Godard, I much preferred 'Masculin Feminin' (1966), so if you're new to him, I would start there instead. You may also try the Truffaut film we see on the marquee of a theater towards the end, 'Jules and Jim' (1962), which was a nice little tip of the cap to his fellow director.

I found this French film in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, I wouldn't have known about it without being entered in the book, and I didn't know what to expect, but I hoped it would be worth it, directed by Jean-Luc Godard (Breathless, Alphaville, Pierrot Le Fou). Basically the story is told as twelve brief unconnected episodes, exploring the life of young beautiful Parisian woman Nana Kleinfrankenheim (Anna Karina). Nana is in her early twenties, she leaves her husband and infant son to try and achieve her ambition to become an actress, however without money she is forced to become a shop girl. Unable to enter acting, Nana slowly descends into the world of prostitution, in order to earn better money, she soon gets herself a pimp, Raoul (Sady Rebbot). He later, at an unspecified time, sells her to another pimp, during the exchange an argument breaks out between the pimps, Nana is caught between the crossfire and killed by gunshot. Also starring André S. Labarthe as Paul, Guylaine Schlumberger as Yvette, Gérard Hoffman as Cook, Monique Messine as Elisabeth, Paul Pavel as Journalist and Brice Parain as Philosopher, with voice narration from Jean-Luc Godard. Karina, also the director's wife at the time, gives a marvellous performance as the tragic unconventional heroine, the film is all unconventional, it is part of the New Wave, this was one of the first major films to have sex earning money, so it gained notoriety, there is the gangster element, it has good techniques of camera angles, and it is stylish in black and white, all together it is a most worthwhile drama. Very good!

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.

"Vivre sa vie: Film en douze tableaux" is another one by Godard ("A bout de suffle" was the previous) about wasted youth, going down and losing any sort of control (plans, dreams, perspective, whatever) over life.In this case it is a brief and intense story of a young beautiful woman (Nana) confused whether to pursue the acting career and at the same time desperately trying to make the ends meet and therefore opted to prostitution instead.Youth is a time when we are particularly fragile and vulnerable, when lifetime opportunities are mixed with risks of failing big time, and many factors, events, acquaintances may influence our choice and chances. Yet we are fully responsible for what we do and the current state is the consequence of our actions. In one scene Nana says the more or less same thing.She is not dumb, spoiled and empty-headed chick, on the contrary, however her choice and actions led her to the downfall and no one cared or tried to help her like it usually happens in life, sad and sometimes cruel and ordinary thing. And the genius of Godard revealed in making it rather disturbing and thought-provocative in the minimalistic and very expressive way. One might also find it especially poignant as we all have our moments wasted perhaps not so dramatically. Anna Karina is absolutely stunning in this film, her yearning eyes filled with melancholy, confusion and sadness and fragile beauty are captivating.