A part of me is tempted to read Godard's wonderful Vivre Sa Vie solely in Marxist terms. A young Parisian woman, Nana (Anna Karina), leaves a stable working-class relationship to pursue her dreams (she wants to become a film actor). But instead of rising to fame, she slides down into prostitution.

She needs money, she can't go back to her old, predictable ways, she wants more from life, and all she owns is her body and her youth. She is not a slave; no one is forcing her to sell her sex. The shameful situation has resulted from a choice she made. Society is not to blame. Capitalism is not to blame. Her family is not to blame. Instead of legitimately trading her labor power on the job market, she—as a thinking individual, as a citizen in a democratic society—met a stranger on the street, led him to a dingy room in a hotel, determined a price, and let him have his way with her. And after this initial encounter, she did not stop, turn, and run back to the safety of her family, the job market, the apparatuses of the state (church, school, the law), but knowingly continued to meet other men in dingier and dingier hotel rooms, to befriend other prostitutes in bars patronized by Parisian criminals, and to surrender her freedom to an obviously ruthless pimp.

Her tragic end has its source nowhere else but in herself, her freedom. Indeed, the more I think about this movie, the more I'm convinced that the part of me that wants to read it in Marxist terms is absolutely right.