Cinema: A Love Song

My Life to Live. Jean-Luc Godard is the wild man of the new French cinema. After Breathless, the volcanic melodrama that inaugurated his career way back in 1960, he made two movies that even his friends admit are terrible. Then last year he suddenly settled down and made this brilliant film. My Life is a tour de style almost as startling as Breathless but more subtly accomplished, more purely felt. It is also a lyric poem in which the camera assiduously adores a beautiful woman. It is finally the tragic allegory of a soul whose pilgrimage to grace goes spiraling ecstatically down the drain.

The soul of the allegory belongs to a pretty but apparently quite ordinary young Parisienne (played by Anna Karina, in private life the director’s wife) who all at once experiences an intense compulsion to be or to become “somebody special.” She abandons her young husband and their baby and takes a job as a salesgirl. Careless with money, she falls behind in her rent. Locked out of her flat, she spends one night with one young man, another with another. After a while, sick of being broke, she accepts some francs for her franchise. The money is nice to have, but she gets more than money out of the experience. She gets a feeling of independence, a feeling that she has made a free choice and is responsible for her whole life. For the first time she feels she is an individual, somebody special. She finds something much like salvation in prostitution, and at the climax the harlot meets some thing like a martyr’s death.

No doubt the paradox is pressed too far. Godard does not seriously mean to say that every little phryne is a saint with eyeshadow. He simply means to say, and he says it eloquently, that the pursuit of pleasure may also be a search for the self. The theme is illustrated with utmost art in the portrait of the heroine. Not since Stiller’s camera turned to stare at Garbo has a man made such searing love with a lens. Godard’s camera never lets the girl out of its sight. It circles her endlessly, kisses her hands, caresses her shoulders, brushes her lips and her hair, turns all at once to feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.

My Life, however, is more than an allegory, more than an amorous album. It is an inspired attempt to enlarge and liberate the language of film. Godard tries more cinematic tricks than most moviemakers risk in an entire career, and almost all of them come off. To make a shock scene jump and jitter, he boldly yanks occasional frames out of the sequence. To emphasize an idea, he brutally amputates an episode in mid-speech and lets a phrase fall through the mind like a severed hand. To retard a rhythm or invite a second thought, he serves up a fade so slow it seems like a memory. To enrich his theme and variegate his texture, he abruptly interjects a two-minute “quote” from another movie and later for the same reasons rabbets in some paragraphs of Edgar Allan Poe. To check and jumble the flow of the story, he chops it into twelve curt chapters, each labeled like a folder in a file.

The total effect? A string of subtle, acute, spontaneous, graceful, ironic skits. A tragedy in the form of a revue.