Yesterday morning I found myself haunted by a rather long dialogue in an otherwise brief French film from the 60’s.
While my motivation to really sit down and focus my attention on a movie has really dwindled recently, I later started up the film with the intention of just watching the one scene from the film that was on my mind all morning and ended up watching the whole thing, eyes transfixed to the screen.
Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre sa vie was a pretty formative film for me transitioning into my college years; I watched Vivre sa vie soon after high school ended, and at least another two times during college. It’s a common notion that the sign of a good film is when you always find something new, feel something new when you watch it again. But lately I’ve found that notion to be a tad simplistic, because to watch or read or play a certain piece a year after your previous engagement is to come back to it a wholly different being.
Every time I watched Vivre sa vie, I watched it with a slightly different lens, blurred with imprints and dust grains of my own ever-changing experiences. I still felt the things the director generally expected or wanted me to feel, living her life as the title invites you to do in that paradoxically visceral yet distanced sense that is cinema. But I always brought something into the picture too, as any good piece of art tends to encourage you to do.
Vivre sa vie’s about a woman who becomes a prostitute to earn enough money to scrape by at its most objective, basic level. But that’s never what the film’s only about to any viewer. Maybe just for the first time watching it, that was what the film was about to me; you’re unfortunately always forced to engage with plot on the first go-round.
But then the next time I watched it, it was about love. Another viewing: art and truth, the real. And another: a shared viewing with a dear friend, discussion to follow; our converging, mingling subjectivities.
And yesterday: language, unsurprisingly.
To say that the scene I kept viewing in my mind while I was having breakfast yesterday morning was a memorable one doesn’t really narrow it down. Vivre sa vie’s filled with those; just the thought of them gives me the itch to watch it again.
The protagonist Nana watching The Passion of Joan of Arc; a spiritual transference, from Joan to Nana. Her easygoing, seductive pool room shuffle. Nana philosophizing over white wine in a cafe about how she’s Existentially free and responsible for her own happiness. A chanson from a jukebox and a montage soon after. Godard jump-cutting a shot to the rhythm of machine gun rounds being fired outside. Mind-blowing.
Nana’s actor Anna Karina is magnetic whenever she has screen time. I’m captivated by every little gesture or mannerism captured by the camera. Her face morphs in the most subtle ways. She delivers her lines with a sort of breathy grace. She makes smoking look glamorous (like everyone did in French movies back then, it’s scary how they make smoking look so fucking cool). It helps that she’s positively one of the most attractive women I’ve laid eyes on. Godard agrees and knows that she’s positively one of the most attractive women he’s laid eyes on. He anxiously wrestles with the notion of inevitably objectifying his wife behind the camera and on the silver screen in the film itself.
NANA FAIT DE LA PHILOSOPHIE SANS LE SAVOIR
All of this to say that for a film with an 85-minute runtime (those are, unfortunately, hard to come by these days), this movie is dense with cinematic brilliance; simply incredible moments etched in my mind forever. But the scene I keep coming back to is this one:
It’s easily one of the longest dialogues in the film if not the longest, running at roughly nine minutes. We watch Nana striking up a conversation with a scholar in a café. Watch the entire thing; really soak it in, first because it’s just a really amazing piece of dialogue, but also because I really doubt I’d do it justice with my writing but here goes. Not even one minute into the conversation, Nana says:
“Suddenly I don’t know what to say; it often happens to me. I know what I want to say. I think about whether or not it is what I mean. But when the moment comes to speak, I can’t say it.”
And then later she asks why we even need to talk: “The more one talks, the less the words mean.” It’s like that scene in Pulp Fiction where Uma Thurman asks why people always feel like it’s necessary to yak about bullshit all the time thirty years earlier. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if Tarantino straight up took this scene and rewrote it a bit for his movie, subconsciously or otherwise; I know Tarantino loved him some Godard back in the day.
…Anyway, The philosopher and Nana go back and forth a bit; the philosopher posits that we talk because we have to: to communicate and even to think we need words, of course. Nana then becomes frustrated with how hard it is to express what we want, “Do words betray us?” she asks desperately.
“But we betray them, too,” the philosopher counters.
Why is it so difficult to say what we mean? Even writing what we mean, especially with how we send messages and texts all the time can be surprisingly difficult even with how premeditated it is. And why are we so bad at it? Even when writing this about the film I was tempted to just scrap it altogether; I knew what I wanted to touch on, but when it came time to express those ideas I was drawing blanks, and I didn’t know if I’d do a good job expressing them.
But I ultimately decided that I really wanted to express those things, so I had to do it. And so, here we are.
I think for the past few times I’ve watched it, I’ve always held this scene dear to my heart for its last few minutes, when Nana asks, “shouldn’t love be the only truth?” I’d always be moved to tears for whatever reason, listening to this man in an almost-documentary exchange talk about needing to search for the maturity to love, to know what it is that we really want in love and in life altogether. How love is a solution on the condition that it be true.
But this time, what really sank in on me was how the man responds after Nana asks, “how can one be sure of having found the right word?”
“One must work. It needs an effort. One must speak in a way that is right—doesn’t hurt, says what has to be said, does what has to be done—without hurting or bruising.”
I think that line speaks for itself.
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