This Saturday night, I stayed home after a long sleep and a whole day of rolling around in bed. I felt extremely bored—like my mind had been stuck in the same routine for too many days. I needed something refreshing, something that could pull me out of the dull rhythm of daily work.
So I started searching for an old film to watch. Whenever I watch old movies, I feel my mind slow down. There’s a quiet, peaceful moment where I can fully focus on the film itself—no noise, no rush, just me and the story.
VIVRE SA VIE – Film by French director Jean-Luc Godard.
A film divided into twelve small, quiet chapters.
Vivre sa vie review — Nana’s emotional core.
Nana, the main character, is in her twenties, wishing to become an actress in Paris. But as time passes, she slowly loses her direction. The first scene shows her back facing the camera—already a sign that she is drifting away from herself, away from the glamorous dream she once held.
Her life becomes heavier than her dream.
Borrowing money from friends.
Taking adult photos to survive.
A stranger mistaking her for a prostitute on the street.
Every choice she makes pulls her further from the life she expected.
I started taking her shadow into myself, as if I were inside the film. I kept wondering why everything felt so quietly sad and devastating.
What do you expect in life?
What will Nana’s future be? There are several filming techniques—pauses, still frames, slow movements from left to right—especially in the scenes where men talk to Nana and shape her choices for her.
Black and white but aesthetic vision make the whole vision all so beautiful but sad.
The camera doesn’t follow Nana; it watches her, almost like life itself.
The emotional core: Nana’s face as a quiet battlefield
I noticed she often looks down when people ask her questions, maybe out of shame, maybe out of exhaustion.
The existential question: Is choosing the same as living?
In many Jean-Luc Godard film reviews, this café conversation is seen as the heart of the film.
She encounters an older man and asks if he minds her sitting there and buying her a drink. He is reading—it’s part of his work. She smokes and says:
“I know what to say, but when the moment comes to speak, I just can’t say it.” – Nana
“Of course,” the man replies.
“Have you read The Three Musketeers?”
“No,” Nana answers.
“There’s a character named Porthos. Tall, strong. He never had a single thought in his life. One day he places a bomb to blow up a wall,
And for the first time he starts thinking—about risk, about consequences. He stops running, and that moment of thinking kills him.”
I started thinking that maybe Nana doesn’t know how to function as herself. She doesn’t know how to explain what she wants. She only follows where other people push her, drifting into directions she never chose.
“Why do you tell me things like this?” Nana asks.
“No reason” – says old man
But the reason is clear.
Porthos dies the moment he begins to think. And Nana begins to collapse the moment she starts thinking about her own life—what she wants, what she expects, what she hopes she could become.
This short conversation becomes the quiet heart of the film. It reveals something painful:
Some people know what they want, but life never gives them the space to live it. Some people begin to think—and thinking becomes too heavy.
Nana’s tragedy is not that she made the wrong choices. Her tragedy is that she never had the freedom to live inside those choices.
There are moments in our lives when we feel the same—quietly lost, confused, unsure whether the direction we’re walking is truly ours. We know what we want, but we don’t know how to reach it. Or we know what to say, but when the moment comes, we can’t speak.
Vivre sa vie stays quiet, simple, almost bare. No decoration, no dramatic music, no emotional manipulation. Just a woman trying to understand her life, and a world that never waits for her.
This Vivre sa vie review reminds me how fragile our choices can be.
Maybe the hardest part of living is not choosing, but carrying the weight of the choices we make. Nana tries, quietly, softly—but the world around her never slows down enough for her to catch up.
