Every Man for Himself - Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1980) (Criterion Collection)

Read more

After a decade in the wilds of avant-garde and early video experimentation, Jean-Luc Godard returned to commercial cinema with this star-driven work of social commentary, while remaining defiantly intellectual and formally cutting-edge. Every Man for Himself, featuring a script by Jean-Claude Carriere and Anne-Marie Mieville, 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. Made twenty years into his career, it was, Godard said, his "second first film."