Sofia’s review published on Letterboxd:
Vivre Sa Vie— a film woven from disparate threads, bleakly strung together into twelve vignettes. It is a tale of utter disillusionment, unraveling the saga of a woman groping in an unfeeling world, meandering passively amidst the tragedy and silence. Faceless conversations revealing nothing and everything, cruelties uttered from the backs of heads, obscured in the clutter and noise of city life. The more we talk, the less the words mean.
Nana trundles through a series of cages— confined within marriage, prostitution, the unyielding clutch of aimlessness, her own misery, for which she believes herself responsible. This sense of incarceration is heightened by her aimless wanderings in a male dominated world, a world in which her only currency is her appearance, her only autonomy found in accepting her own flesh as capital. It is a world caught in the shackles of patriarchy and economic oppression, a world in which she cannot find stability unless she is of worth to a man— either as a wife or a prostitute.
And yet, laced throughout these suggestions of confinement and enfettered agency, are Sartrean ruminatinons on freewill— Nana’s own thoughts revealing her beliefs that she is unalterably responsible for her own misery. She wishes to live in a world of silence, despairs over philosophies of language and the inevitability of miscommunications. Do words betray us? Yes, but we betray them too.
Talking is almost a resurrection. When we talk it’s a different life from our silence... we must go through the death of life without talking.