MD: But the film doesn’t think on its own! 
JLG: Yes, it does! 
MD: Don’t start talking nonsense! Without you, there’s no film. 
JLG: No, without me, there’s no witness. 
MD: There’s nothing! 

- Marguerite Duras and Jean-Luc Godard’s 1979 Dialogue in Cyril Béghin’s Duras/Godard Dialogues 

Following nearly a decade of technological and formal innovation and experimentation, often in the relatively isolated milieu of French television, Sauve qui peut (la vie) marked Jean-Luc Godard’s return to the spotlight and the beginning of another remarkable period of productivity. Sauve qui peut (la vie) – which Godard referred to as his “second first film” – saw the filmmaker embrace a new generation of French actors to explore the intertwining personal and professional lives of three characters: television director Paul Godard (Jacques Dutronc), television producer Denise Rimbaud (Nathalie Baye), and a young prostitute, Isabelle Rivière (Isabelle Huppert). 

Set across urban and countryside locations in Switzerland, and divided into four chapters, the film charts the protracted break-up of colleagues Paul and Denise, whose romantic entanglement seems to have quickly soured, affecting both their personal and professional lives. Circling and occasionally intersecting this disintegrating union is Isabelle, who leaves the countryside for the city to become a sex worker, and quickly finds herself enveloped in a series of bizarre and cruel interactions. 

Both self-effacing in its autobiographical elements – as a film focusing on a filmmaker with the same second name as its director – and relentlessly ambitious in its free form approach to slow-motion, Sauve qui peut (la vie), in trademark Godard style, is as much a dissection of sexual politics and the consumptive nature of capitalist society as it is an existential inquiry into the very nature and purpose of image-making. 

Sauve qui peut (la vie) also marked the first of three now well-known dialogues between Jean-Luc Godard and Marguerite Duras in 1979, 1980 and 1987. In late 1979, during the film’s shoot in Switzerland, Godard invited Marguerite Duras to play herself in one of the film’s scenes. Despite the fact she had chosen to cast herself in Le Camion two years earlier, a film the two would later discuss at great length, Duras refused to be filmed. In the end, Godard would use fragments of her voice, recorded from their conversation, as part of the film’s soundtrack and, in one particular scene, have his cigar-smoking namesake explicitly reference Duras’ refusal to make an appearance, before quoting Duras’ reflections on her relationship to cinema at length.