11/20/2022 0 Comments Twist of my life best endingsIn France, prostitution is called "the life," which gives another meaning to the title. What is there to do in this Paris but hang out in bars, smoke, wish you had more money? Prostitution for her isn't much more interesting than pinball. Later Raoul inhales and kisses her, and she blows out his smoke. She smokes while a client embraces her, looking over his shoulder, eyes empty. The camera is not expressing a "style" but the way people look at other people.įmous shots. She refuses, then smiles and exhales at the same time, and the camera turns away from Raoul and approaches her, suddenly interested, as she does. "Give me a smile," he says, as the camera holds them both in two-shot. On the street with the hookers, the camera looks first down one side and then the other, slowing at a woman it finds intriguing. In a bar, the camera starts to pan to the left and then glances back again. In the record store, it pans back and forth with Nana and a customer, then turns and looks out a window. She goes to a street where prostitutes work. She's picked up by the cops_a dispute about a "dropped" 1,000-franc note. She ditches the guy who bought her the ticket, and meets a guy in a bar who wants to take some pictures of her. She goes to see a movie (Dreyer's " The Passion of Joan of Arc," about a woman judged by men). Is this her fault, or fate? Why did she leave Paul? Has she no feelings for her child? The movie does not say. She tries to steal her flat key from the office of her concierge, but is caught and frog-marched to the street, her arm twisted behind her. The movie is in 12 sections, each one with titles like an old-fashioned novel. "The film was made by sort of a second presence," Godard said the camera is not just a recording device but a looking device, that by its movements makes us aware that it sees her, wonders about her, glances first here and then there, exploring the space she occupies, speculating. Raoul Coutard, the cinematographer who worked side-by-side with Godard during this period, has his camera track back and forth, first behind Nana's head, then Paul's, their faces glimpsed in the mirror. We learn he is her husband, that she has left him and their child, that she has vague plans to go into the movies. In the next shots we see her from behind, in a cafe, as she talks to a man, Paul. Each shot begins with Michel Legrand music, which stops abruptly, to begin again with the next shot_as if to say, the music will try to explain, but fail. The title shots show her in profile and full face, like mug shots, and we will be looking at her for the whole movie, trying to read her, for she reveals nothing willingly. With her porcelain skin, her wary eyes, her helmet of shiny black hair, her chic outfits, always smoking, hiding her feelings, she is a young woman of Paris. It tells the story of Nana, played by Anna Karina, who was Godard's wife at the time. This is a great movie, and I am not surprised to find Susan Sontag describing it as "one of the most extraordinary, beautiful, and original works of art that I know of." I slip it into the machine, and within five minutes I am so fascinated that I do not move, I do not stir, until it is over. But there is a new DVD of "My Life to Live" ("Vivre Sa Vie"), from 1963. I originally think to choose " Breathless" (1960), which fired an opening salvo of the French New Wave, had us all talking about "jump cuts," and made Jean-Paul Belmondo a star. And yet, idly watching television as Aerosmith is inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, I reflect that if they can be resurrected from the ashes of more radical decades, then why not Godard? Now it is all about the mass audience: It must be congratulated for its narrow tastes, and catered to. Films that test the edges of the cinema are out. And now the name Godard inspires a blank face from most filmgoers.
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