Sometime later at a restaurant, Nana writes a letter asking for work (presumably as a prostitute) to an address Yvette gave her, describing herself and her physical features.

Raoul explains the basics of prostitution to Nana, including how to conduct herself, how much she charges and earns, when and where she works, the laws and what to do if faced with an unintended pregnancy.

She is in a hotel room with the young man she had met earlier at the bistro, who reads aloud a passage from "The Oval Portrait" by Edgar Allan Poe.

Vivre sa vie was released shortly after Cahiers du cinéma (the film magazine for which Godard occasionally wrote) published an issue devoted to Bertolt Brecht and his theory of 'epic theatre'.

The film also draws from the writings of Montaigne, Baudelaire, Zola and Edgar Allan Poe, to the cinema of Robert Bresson, Jean Renoir and Carl Dreyer.

"[3] Nana gets into an earnest discussion with a philosopher (played by Brice Parain, Godard's former philosophy tutor), about the limits of speech and written language.

[citation needed] The film depicts the consumerist culture of Godard's Paris; a shiny new world of cinemas, coffee bars, neon-lit pool halls, pop records, photographs, wall posters, pin-ups, pinball machines, juke boxes, foreign cars, the latest hairstyles, typewriters, advertising, gangsters and Americana.

It also features allusions to popular culture; for example, the scene where a melancholy young man walks into a café, puts on a juke box disc, and then sits down to listen.

The unnamed actor is in fact the well known singer-songwriter Jean Ferrat, who is performing his own hit tune "Ma Môme" on the track that he has just selected.

Nana's bobbed haircut replicates that made famous by Louise Brooks in the 1928 film Pandora's Box, where the doomed heroine also falls into a life of prostitution and violent death.

One sequence shows a queue outside a Paris cinema waiting to see Jules et Jim, the new wave film directed by François Truffaut, at the time both a close friend and sometime rival of Godard.

[4] Author and cultural critic Susan Sontag described Vivre sa vie as "a perfect film" and "one of the most extraordinary, beautiful, and original works of art that I know of.

The website's critics consensus reads, "Anna Karina's arresting performance provides a humanizing anchor to Jean-Luc Godard's stylistically explosive portrait of a prostitute.