Sauve qui peut (la vie)

Featuring a script by Jean-Claude Carrière and Anne-Marie Miéville, Sauve qui peut (la vie) (Every Man for Himself), looks at the sexual and professional lives of three people; a television director (Jacques Dutronc), his ex-girlfriend (Nathalie Baye), and a prostitute (Isabelle Huppert); to create a meditative story about work, relationships, and the notion of freedom. The film’s English surtitle Slow Motion, eponymously, gives us some of the most remarkable freeze-frames in contemporary cinema; Nathalie Baye’s cycling scenes in the film form part of Godard’s stop-start visual motif, where the actress exists both in-motion and immortalised, as if frozen in time. Made twenty years into his career, it was – Godard said – his “second first film.”

Nathalie Baye was awarded Best Supporting Actress at the César 1980.