Upstream - S3E11.5: Vivre sa vie [PREVIEW]

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello and welcome to bonus episode of kill James Bond. You know who we are. I hope that just in case you don't I am I am Alice Gordell Kelly. I'm joined as always by my friends Abigail Thorne and Devon. Bonjour. If you don't know who I am at this point, that's on you. Yeah. Yeah. So I've transitioned us from... Again? Force femdus. Yeah, I have force femdus because we've been... I've been making you watch movies about sad European men.

Starting point is 00:00:51 And now we've gotten into the arc where I make you watch movies about sad European men. And now we've gotten into the arc where I make you watch movies about sad European women. And so I picked out something that I've been saving for a long time. Jean-Luc Godard's fourth movie, Vivesavie. And I don't really have a favorite film because my brain doesn't work like that. But if you put a gun to my head and said, stop saying films, say one film only, it's like, it would be this, right? This would be my favorite film. And I'm really nervous about this episode because I've kind of established myself over the course of doing this podcast as like Ms. Film Studies. There is a lot of film studies in this. There's a film studies ass movie. And I want to do it justice. And I don't know. There's a lot

Starting point is 00:01:35 there. And I don't know if I'm equal to the task, but I'm glad that I have my two friends to help me out with this. This is one of those movies where you watch it and you're immediately taken over by, oh, I'm watching a movie here. I've got like a thing going on. I need to pay full attention to this and think about what I'm being shown. And there's been a lot of writing about this film. I don't know how firmly I think I have anything new to say. People are interested in hearing us talk about it, I think.

Starting point is 00:02:01 Exactly. Yeah, it was all right. Yeah, it's fine. I was playing it, wasn't it? It's all right. It's kind of drags in places, but it's okay. Exactly. Yeah, it was all right. Yeah, it's fine. It's fine. It's all right. It's kind of dragging places, but it's okay. I don't get it. If you saw Stella, our adverts, which I know is as a sort of Northerners, Abbey's way

Starting point is 00:02:15 of interacting with media, pre-eminently. Yep. They had this thing. The standard order when I used to work in the pub was two points of Stella and a Pino Grigio with ice. That was for a couple too. This thing and so like I used to work in the pub was two points of stellar and a Pino Grigio with ice That was for a couple too. That's two points of stellar for one man And then a Pino Grigio with ice for his lady friend. These these are gender roles

Starting point is 00:02:36 You're gonna get the scampi crisps as well. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah But so if you remember the ads that they put out that were like taking the piss out of film genres one of them was like the french art film the French new wave art film where it's like lots of sort of like people talking to camera, black and white subtitles about their sort of ennui, right? Yes. That's this, right? That that's a thing that exists for you to make fun of because of films like this. And this is like one of the sort of originators of that. And so, Vyvesavvy, to live her life, right? It's kind of like bland, quotidian title.

Starting point is 00:03:11 It's got us fourth movie. And he made it with his wife, Anna Karina. And let me just say, first and foremost, we've been talking about having 1960s woman dysphoria on this podcast. This to me is the sort of boss battle of 1960s woman dysphoria because ever since I saw this, which I did at quite a young age, I have had Anna Carina dysphoria specifically. And Jean Legault and I have one mind on this because in the course of making this

Starting point is 00:03:42 movie, it is very clear that he believes that Anna Carina is the most beautiful woman in the world and so do I. So she's definitely up there. I mean, that's what you want to do. If you're putting your wife in a film, you want it to be very, very clear that you are horniest shit. Look at my hot wife. Yes. Yeah. It is absolutely look at my hot wife, the movie. And there are so many close ups. I mean, it starts, the titles start with like a profile, like close-up, other profile of Anna Carina. Yeah, might not say incredible side profile, Hoosier surgeon, incredible front profile, Hoosier surgeon, incredible side profile, Hoosier surgeon. I wrote down every day of my life, I show my hairdresser stills from this movie and

Starting point is 00:04:22 he still has yet to get it right. Every day of your life. I'm a bit of a distance from the Anna Carina love because my notes also say she looks like a younger, country aversion of my mom. Like my mom, I have photos of my mom at 19 and she does look like slightly like this. Yeah. So imagine this woman and Sean Connery and that you've got like my parents on film. Wow. This is like deep Alice lore, right? Is that like, if you want to understand why I'm like

Starting point is 00:04:51 this and also why my hair looks like this, it's because I got really into French new wave movies and like fucking Balencibastian. I was insufferable. And yeah, I sort of my my latter adolescence was largely the long blonde song Lust in the movies. And so yeah, it just sort of colonized the whole area of my brain. Also, the other thing I want to say about the titles is so because there's there's film studies happening, right? Yes. And one of the things that happens in this film is that the soundtrack sort of like shows up and then disappears again very abruptly. Yeah, I don't really know what that was about. We'll get to what that's about.

Starting point is 00:05:29 I have to say that. I didn't, there's a lot of this that I like didn't get. Some bits I got and that was one of the bits I didn't. Well, I mean, a lot of it's like philosophical, so we are going to need the tube at some point. That's fine. I've brought the tube. Yes, I am hoping you brought the tube. Yeah, I got it. I mean, if you want me to like just put the thing up front, I

Starting point is 00:05:46 think the soundtrack thing is partially about sort of broader theme of like sound and silence and language. And partially it's an example of verfremdungs effect, which is something that I've mentioned before. It's a kind of like brechtian dramatic thing. Now you speak in my language, brackets German. That's right. Where where you sort of like deliberately alienate and remind the viewer that they're watching a film to be like, not in a sort of Marvel fourth

Starting point is 00:06:11 wall way, although it can be that bit in a way that like it sort of trips you up a bit with the sort of like artificiality of it. Yeah. I mean, I really like it. I like that there's no soundtrack for a lot of it because this is supposed to be just like chapters from a person's life. It's a cinema verite. The soundtrack isn't there unless it has something specific that it wants to communicate. And I like that. I like that a lot. It's a life in 12 scenes, 12 tablets. And we start with an epigram. It's an epigram for an epigram when you start with it, whatever. You start with a line from Montaigne, lend yourself to others, give yourself to yourself. And immediately, we are sort of like in the realm of the transactional, right? And the temporary,

Starting point is 00:06:57 and the distinction between lending and giving, which is going to be like a theme throughout. Yeah. I wasn't in love with this for reasons we'll get to later. Yes, it's problematic. We can problematize this film. Let's. But then I would say incredible back of the head profile. Who's her surgeon? I'm showing this to the head restaurant. Like, how can you get this right?

Starting point is 00:07:21 Yeah, you have it from every angle of this fucking direction. Yeah. So so this is Nana. She's Anna Karina. She is in a cafe, breaking up with her husband, right? And most of this scene is only shot, we only see the backs of their heads, which I was, it was like, oh, that's interesting. Like, why are we doing this? And I was like, oh, this is something that happens a lot throughout the film. My thought is that, like, this is kind of how Nana perceives the world as being like faceless and without sympathy, without like, compassionate eyes to gaze into. We spend as much time in this film looking at the backs of people's heads as we do as their faces. And I guess that's kind of like how she feels about the world, because as we learn, she's very sad, she's very unfulfilled. She's cheated on him.

Starting point is 00:08:10 And she's just like pretty fucking miserable, to be honest. Yeah, there is there is one thing I want to put down that I'm going to pick up later, which is this is mostly the backs of their heads. But you do see her face in the mirror behind the bar, sort of distantly. And I will come back to that later. But yeah, I think two things happening here. First is, as you say, this is sort of like the alienation that she has, but it's also got a kind of like trying to experiment

Starting point is 00:08:37 with how you would shoot a conversation, right? Where ordinarily you would do like shot, reverse shot, shot, and instead of doing that, he would just do the back of the head and like sort of pan across. And so much of this stuff, like the soundtrack or like, you know, the cinematography like that, it feels wrong and it's wrong on purpose. And this, this is one of the things where like, if you're, if you're watching this sort of inattentively, you think, oh, this is, this guy's a fucking idiot. He doesn't know how to make a movie.

Starting point is 00:09:06 Yeah. Yeah, she's not in frame, dude. Gotta point the camera at someone's face. You can't see the person she's talking to, mate. You can't see her back of her head and in front of her face. You only got the soundtrack keeps cutting out. Yeah. What's going on?

Starting point is 00:09:21 Well, now, that's quite enough of that. If you want to hear the rest of this high stakes, What's going on?

Upstream - S3E11.5: Vivre sa vie [PREVIEW]

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