Rating: 4/5
Criterion Challenge 2022 | 42/52 | Starring Anna Karina
Lend yourself to others, but give yourself to yourself. — Montaigne
The film is split into 12 tableaux. The first tableau is titled “A Café — Nana Wants to Give Up — Paul — The Pinball Machine.” Nana sits with her husband Paul at a café, where they discuss an affair Nana had. She tries her words several times to deliver them as perfect lines, annoying Paul, who finds Nana self-involved. But Nana finds Paul difficult to be with, feeling invisible and like she must demand him to see and love her. Nana wishes to be an actress, on stage but perhaps in the movies someday, but Paul finds the desire small-minded, even though he is a musician. Paul sees everyone as the same, but Anna wants to be special. Nana will leave Paul with their infant son to pursue her dream.
A bird is an animal with an inside and an outside. Take away the outside, and the inside is left. Take away the inside, and you see its soul.
Now, Nana works in a record shop but is behind on rent and struggling to make ends meet. She tries to borrow two thousand francs from Paul, her coworkers, or anyone else, but they all refuse. When she returns home, her landlady has kicked her out of the apartment. She tries to break in, but they hold her back. The next day, Paul asks her to dinner, but she goes to see The Passion of Joan of Arc with a man. The film brings Nana to tears.
— How can you still believe God sent you? — God knows our path, but we understand it only at the end of the road.
After the movie, she leaves her date, annoyed that he paid for a movie ticket and didn’t get anything out of it, to meet with another man who promised to take photos of her. She lies to the photographer about the date being her brother. He shows her a layout of images, which he claims is a package one puts together to send out to people in films. It will require her to undress, which she reluctantly agrees to.
The film follows Nana as she gives more and more of herself in the search to live her own life.
Nana resembles Louise Brooks in Pandora’s Box, with her bobbed haircut and the direction her life takes. The film suggests in each scene that death is coming. At the record shop, we see the French title for “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” “le lion est mort ce soir,” or “The Lion Died Tonight.” When we watch The Passion of Joan of Arc, it is the scene where the priests come to prepare her for death and martyrdom.
The death may be spiritual, as the image of the bird losing its inside and outside only leaves a soul, and Nana has both taken from her in one way or another. Regardless, Goddard wants to destroy Nana, the same way that he wanted to “destroy” cinema. Godard is seeking a new reality in film—a “more real” reality. He used improvisation as the driving force of scenes and refused retakes, allowing whatever occurred to be the definitive version.
The cinematography is notably minimal, using methods of distancing to make the film more “film-like.” The camera shoots dialogue with the characters’ backs to the screen. The editing is almost haphazard, cutting before the scenes feel over. The intertitles tell us what will happen in each scene, cutting into scenes, giving it the feeling of collage or assemblage.
Modernity, in whatever age it appears, cannot exist without a shattering of belief and without discovery of the "lack of reality" of reality, together with the invention of other realities. — Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition
In this way, the film also rejects a progressive storytelling flow. A scene happens, an intertitle tells us something else will happen, and it does. It all moves in one direction, but we don’t get why or how. We arrive at moments, or more importantly, we see Nana make choices that, by design, we cannot understand. We can empathize with Nana, but if we want to humanize Nana, that is left as an exercise for the audience.
We can understand this: Nana does not know where she belongs in the world. And the world does not give her a perch to rest—only a way to obliteration.
Le bonheur n'est pas gai.