Sauve qui peut (la vie)

Described by Jean-Luc Godard as “my second first film”, SAUVE QUI PEUT (LA VIE) marked the legendary director’s glorious return to “mainstream” narrative cinema after a decade of low-budget Maoist works and video experiments. (Godard apparently wasn’t kidding when he had the closing title of his 1967 masterpiece WEEKEND declare, not simply “Fin”, but “Fin du cinema” – “End of Cinema”!) Set in Switzerland, the film is a characteristically self-reflexive, characteristically corrosive comic account of emotional confusion, the problems of filmmaking, and the metaphysics of survival in western capitalist culture, centred on an extended, highly provocative analogy between sexual degradation and economic exploitation. The Godardian plot has French pop star Jacques Dutronc as a dislikeable filmmaker named Godard, Nathalie Baye (in a César-winning performance) as the girlfriend who is trying to leave him, and Isabelle Huppert as a woman from the country working as a prostitute in the city.