Vivre pour vivre (1967)
Directed by Claude Lelouch

Film Review

After the worldwide success of his Oscar-winning hit Un homme et une femme (1966) Claude Lelouch was showered with offers of work in Hollywood, but he resisted the lure of Tinsel Town and instead continued to plough his own idiosyncratic path in France, his profile happily raised by what is now considered one of the most iconic French films of the 1960s.  Lelouch followed his dazzling portrayal of a couple falling in love with a somewhat gloomier account of a married couple falling out of love.  Vivre pour vivre would seem to be the mirror image of Un homme et une femme, but it is probably better to regard these as two halves of a dyptich that both celebrates and laments the stinging transience of romantic love.  Vivre pour vivre proved to be another critical success for Lelouch - it not only won the Grand Prix du Cinéma Français (the percursor to the Best Film César) but was also honoured with the Golden Globe for the Best Foreign Film of 1967.

As with his previous film, Lelouch was blessed with his principal casting for Vivre pour vivre, with Yves Montand and Annie Girardot as perfectly suited for the leads as Jean-Louis Trintignant and Anouk Aimée had been in the preceding, less sombre film.  It was whilst making the film that Lelouch fell head-over-in-heels in love with his lead actress, and this is more than evident in the way he films Girardot, not as the butch feminist that she would tend towards in later years, but as a sensitive woman endowed with qualities that transcend mere beauty - charm, understanding, warmth and intelligence.  So successfully does Lelouch frame Girardot as the ideal woman that her co-star Yves Montand cannot help but resemble the egoistical male fool - the husband who is too easily tempted by youth and beauty to realise the prize he risks losing, a woman of greater worth.  Lelouch's shameless adoration of Girardot was to continue on their next film together, Un homme qui me plaît (1969).

Vivre pour vivre sees Lelouch moving on to deeper territory and it is one of his darker, more ironic films, although its appeal is somewhat dented by the fact that it lacks the artistic and narrative coherence of Un homme et une femme.  The haphazard inclusion of newsreel footage which constantly hammers home man's inhumanity to man seems somewhat arbitrary and a needless distraction from the central narrative, although, as in some of the director's subsequent films, these grim, brutally inserted splinters of reality remind us of the unthinking brutality that lies within us all, and the chaos on which our lives are founded.  It is the patchwork quilt feel of the film - less grandiose and self-conscious than in Lelouch's later, more overblown offerings - that makes Vivre pour vivre such a vivid and arresting movie experience.  In some scenes, Lelouch dispenses with dialogue altogether - the images alone tell us all that needs to be said, and if they fall short Francis Lai's music amply fills the gap.

Film Synopsis

Robert Collombs is a well-known French television reporter whose love life is as eventful as his globe-trotting career.  Despite being happily married to Catherine, he takes advantage of the freedom offered by his job to carry on numerous affairs without his wife's knowledge.  As soon as one liaison with an actress, Mireille, finishes, another begins - this time with a young American model named Candice.  The latter agrees to accompany Robert on his next assignment to Kenya, to make a report about mercenaries.  After this, Robert joins his wife in Amsterdam, both hoping to reawaken their former passion.  This second honeymoon is derailed by Candice's unexpected appearance in the city.  Of course, Robert cannot resist meeting up with the model, and when his wife sees through his lies he has no choice but to admit his infidelity.  Catherine and her husband part on bad terms.  Just before setting out for his next assignment in Vietnam, Robert decides to end his affair with Candice and is surprised by her willingness to let him go.  On his return from Vietnam, where he is detained in prison for several months, Robert finds that Catherine has made a new life for herself - a life that no longer has any place for him.