Click here to copy URL

Vivre sa vie

Vivre sa vie: Film en douze tableaux

1962

Jean-Luc Godard

Anna Karina, Sady Rebbot, André S. Labarthe, Guylaine Schlumberger ...

7.7

7,937

Drama Nana (Anna Karina) is a beautiful Parisian in her early twenties who deliberately leaves her husband and her infant son hoping to become an actress. Without money, beyond what she earns as a shopgirl, and unable to enter acting, she elects to earn better money as a prostitute. Soon she has a pimp, Raoul, who regularises her work. Nana's life is told in 12 brief episodes each preceded by a written resume. Godard introduces other ... [+]

	Author	Review
United States	Roger Ebert rogerebert.com	"Within five minutes I am so fascinated that I do not move, I do not stir, until it is over. This is a great movie (…) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 4)"	POS
United States	Bosley Crowther The New York Times	"The girl, played by Anna Karina (...) never emerges as much more than an amiable, stupid, helpless thing (...) Godard is a bold experimenter, but it's time he picked himself a stronger theme."	NEU
United States	Dave Kehr Chicago Reader	"[It] isn't the most stimulating of Godard's early work, but it does show him beginning to pull away from traditional cutting patterns and sequence arrangement."	POS
United Kingdom	Philip French The Guardian	"Susan Sontag called 'Vivre sa vie' 'a perfect film' and 'one of the most extraordinary, beautiful and original works of art that I know of'. Many of us agreed with Sontag then and we still do."	POS
United Kingdom	David Parkinson Empire	"Beautifully photographed by Raoul Coutard (...) It simply makes cinema-going worthwhile (...) This is Godard's forgotten masterpiece. See it (…) Rating: ★★★★★ (out of 5)"	POS
United States	Mick LaSalle SFGATE	"If Jean-Luc Godard only made this one film, it would be enough to put him in the cinematic pantheon. This is one of the all-time great films"	POS
United States	Keith Phipps AV Club	"As usual for this period in Godard’s career, his restless confidence in the language of movies, a language he helped redefine on the fly, smoothes out the patchwork texture."	POS
United Kingdom	Tom Milne Time Out	"Godard expressed doubts about the cheap gangster pyrotechnics as being merely a nod to cinephilia. But (...) they are in fact a distantiating device forcing a more direct confrontation with the film's true subject"	POS
United States	Steven Rea Philadelphia Inquirer	"Forty-six years later, the brute genius of Jean-Luc Godard continues to amaze (...) A dazzling cinematic experiment and a heart-mover (…) Rating: ★★★½ (out of 4)"	POS
United States	Eric Henderson Slant	"I could watch Anna Karina compose a letter for hours (…) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 5)"	POS

Return to movie

We encourage you to check the reviews' original sources. Intellectual property rights of these reviews belong to their authors and/or the correspondent media from which they have been extracted. If you'd like to help us to add more reviews to your favorite movies, just send us a message.