Vivre sa vie

Yet another Godard, and Anna Karina again (his wife at the time, I think). This one was at a theatre called the 'Red Vic' - a 'worked owned and operated movie house' here in San Francisco - and features AK as a penurious young woman in Paris who slides into prostitution. It's told in twelve scenes, each introduced by a scene card which summarises (and in some cases illuminates) what is to come, and involves periods of silence, unexpected outbreaks of music (one of which is accompanied by dancing), and one explicitly philosophical conversation (in which a stranger, 'l'inconnu', expounds on Liebniz and on how German philosophers showed that it is necessary to take life as it is, with all of its imperfections and lumps, rather than seeking an impossible perfection). Fittingly, given its subject matter, it offers relatively few flights of whimsy 'within' the film, and stylistically it's somewhat more restrained than some of the other JLGs that I've seen in the last few months, but it's still recognisably one of his, and it has a kind of, I don't know, aesthetic and anti-sentimental (anti-kitsch?) toughness that makes one think, 'Yes. Yes, this is a real movie.'