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Rating: "Do not ask us for the word" - I would say with the poet, if someone asked me to describe (or at least TRY to do so) something like this. But the task is uneven, impossible to deny. Yet something must be said, and an effort must be made, for more than one reason: not because (or at least not only) 50 years have passed since the first screening of the film, nor because - to date - no one on DeBaser has preceded me in reviewing this movie. What you are reading cannot even be considered a review in the strict sense, it is better to understand it as an act of gratitude. Gratitude towards Those who conceived and produced all this, for what "This Is My Life" has represented for me. With this page, I mainly go to settle a debt, without the claim of being or appearing complete, without seeking the sharing of those who read and without asking for anything more.
...a masterpiece, of course. Such definitions have been plentiful over the span of half a century. But the reasons, the deep and paradoxical mystery that justifies the charm of Godard's film, hide right behind this simple observation: how is it possible for a film born out of contingency, essentially an artistic response to a journalist's inquiry on prostitution in France, to still seem alive and relevant after 50 years? Maybe the solution is already in the title: the "life", or rather, the "LIVING of one’s life". Such themes were born with mankind and will end with the end of mankind: the same reason why today it is not obsolete to be interested in Plato, Seneca, Erasmus of Rotterdam, or Indian wisdom: after all, it’s about US; and when it’s about something that concerns us, it's human to always have your ears perked up. If anything, the danger is not in NOT talking about it, but in talking about it inappropriately: today we fill our mouths with lofty phrases like the "meaning of life" and the like, but they pass through our mouths so often that we no longer grasp their depth. How easy it is to slip into banality, how easy it is to make cheap psychology a means of entertainment for the public. Here Godard achieved his feat, avoiding the slip: not only into the obviousness of the "already said", but also into the moral judgment on prostitution, where one often falls even starting from opposite intentions. Thus he laid the foundation for the timeless greatness of his work: starting from the particular, from a modest "ordinary" story, and through it, embracing the universal.
It was a break, indeed, if it is true that the film stands alone even within the same Nouvelle Vague. The subtitle of the work, it is no detail, is "Film In Twelve Tableaux"; pure formal segmentation? Actually, much more: each panel is introduced by a caption that preludes the situation (or situations) presented - it's a tribute to silent cinema, for sure, but they are also different stages in the life of the protagonist, of a journey that is not evolution but a (terrible) involution. Stations of a Via Crucis, it has often been rightly said, moments of a calvary, the salient points of a martyrdom: tragically foreshadowed by the panel on "The Passion of Joan of Arc" by Dreyer (an incomparable metafilmic moment: it is cinema WITHIN cinema), which Nana watches, crying the heroine and her fate. The progression in tableaux (but you only truly understand this as you proceed from panel to panel) abandons the didactic coldness it originates from along the way, and triggers a mental process in the viewer over which Godard has total control: the detachment that separates director and character, and in turn character and viewer, is only apparent; Nana is all of us, and all of us are Nana. What we face is a dramatic truth that takes shape with the addition of new, further pieces.
Godard is the invisible creator, and handles the camera with a style that could not be more personal/experimental: the actors turning their backs to the viewer, prolonged close-ups with a fixed camera, the shadow that - aided by black and white - invades the scene and shapes it, as in the interrogation panel at the police station; a song playing from a jukebox that replaces the dialogue, the unnatural and disorienting silence of Parisian boulevards making the ghostly silhouette that stands to the side of the roads even heavier, the voice-overs for long endless minutes, the protagonist's own (weak, uncertain) writing taking the place of spoken word. In appearance, then, it is the language that is the protagonist of this film: the word with its assertive force, the word spoken without speaking, the word suggested by the environmental background. In reality, it is not so. Or at least, not even such an apparatus, well-prepared and studied in all its facets, would suffice to account for the greatness of what we have before our eyes. There is something more missing.
That something more is Anna Karina. That is: probably, the most Womanly Woman ever to appear on a screen. Multi-award-winning actresses, cinema divas, icons of film imagery: I have never seen anyone act like Anna Karina did. And speak as she did, in this film in particular. Nothing can be said about this, simply abandon yourself to the absolute power of images that renew the miracle - still and always, the first time like the last time I was faced with this film. Nothing can match the scene of the weeping in front of Joan of Arc's stake; as nothing can match the moment when, while the philosopher moves from Plato to the Three Musketeers, she turns to the camera and seems to really look/talk to you; and in those eyes, in that moment of unaware naïve philosophy, the meaning seems already to be reflected, the very time of life flowing, as the time of a film flows...
...nothing can equate those moments, not even the black background - a curtain that falls swiftly, murderously, saying the film is over; almost in haste, not even waiting for the car's passage, restarting without delay, roaring away the shot from a few - only a few - moments before.
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