Every Man for Himself (Sauve qui peut (la vie))

This 1980 film, which found Jean-Luc Godard returning to cinema after working in video through the ’70s, is a complicated exploration of relations. A work that Godard considers his “second first film,” “Every Man for Himself” charts the intertwined lives of three characters: Paul Godard (Jacques Dutronc), a filmmaker whose marriage is on the rocks; his ex-girlfriend, Denise Rimbaud (Nathalie Baye), who wants to escape to the country; and Isabelle Rivière (Isabelle Huppert), a prostitute who sells her body to lead a free life.

Benjamin Strong in L Magazine writes: “Thirty years later, ‘Every Man for Himself’ – a dark but cheeky, slightly surreal sexual comedy of manners about the existential chasm separating men and women – still causes the heart to leap.” Observing that the film “bristles with energy,” the New Yorker’s Richard Brody concludes: “Profanity, perversity, humiliation, frustration and violence erupt in luminous tableaux, painterly landscapes, and crisp Swiss city views that glow with the textual finesse of sunlight and available light and sing the artistic inspirations and psychic freedoms of modern Europe.”