Live for Life (Vivre pour vivre) is a 1967 film from France directed by Claude Lelouch.
Robert (Yves Montand) is a documentarian and war correspondent for French television. He is serially unfaithful to his wife Catherine (Annie Girardot), who is classy and sexy and so awesome that she's more or less willing to overlook him constantly cheating on her. (Robert does knot know that Catherine is on to him.)
Enter Candice (Candice Bergen, speaking French in all but one scene). Robert meets Candice, a fashion model, while he's off on an adulterous weekend with another girlfriend. Robert embarks on a passionate affair with Candice, whisking her off to Africa when he's making a documentary there, and enjoying numerous romantic getaways. But soon Candice starts demanding more of a commitment, and Catherine begins to feel like she's had enough.
Tropes:
- Art Imitates Art: A shot of Vincent Van Gogh's famous painting of the Langolais bridge, hanging in a gallery, cuts to Robert and Catherine on an upraised drawbridge.
- Camp Follower: The French mercenary commander tells Robert that they have two women in camp. When Robert asks if they go into combat too, the commander says no, "they have other duties." The two women are the camp prostitutes.
- Creative Closing Credits: Creative opening credits (in fact, the film has no closing credits). All the credits are posted in the opening scene so that they resemble headlines and classified ads from newspapers.
- Danger Takes a Backseat: The last shot of the film, played not for terror but for romance and the Happy Ending. Robert has followed Catherine to a snowy ski resort at Christmas. He asks her to take him back but she says no. Robert, preparing to leave, goes to his car and finds the windshield covered with snow. He brushes it off the driver's side. He then goes around to the passenger side, brushes the snow off, and sees Catherine in the passenger seat, smiling. The End.
- Dies Wide Open: Several such shots of staring, sightless dead American soldiers, after Robert goes to Vietnam to cover the war.
- The Ditz: Mirelle, Robert's good-looking but dim girlfriend. She finds out that he'll soon be going to Vietnam for work and says "Is it far away from Indochina?" (Vietnam was part of the French colony of Indochina, along with Cambodia and Laos.)
- Eagleland: Discussed Trope! After breaking up with Robert, Candice goes back to America. As she's shown going around New York, she says to herself in Inner Monologue that she was in Europe too long and she needs to re-Americanize herself. She promises herself to eat "steak wrapped in plastic," go to drive-in movie theaters, and have children named John and Elizabeth.
- Establishing Character Moment: Robert is lounging in a hotel room while his hot girlfriend showers in the background. He calls the desk clerk and asks the clerk to call him back in five minutes. When the clerk does so, Robert fakes a conversation that is an excuse for him to make a quick exit from the hotel. He leaves the hot lady in the room, flirts with Candice outside, then heads back to Paris—and we find out that he's married.
- Every Car Is a Pinto: Lampooned in the silly ending to the terrible movie that Mirelle is in. She drives her car off a cliff, and it catches fire and explodes well before hitting the ground.
- I Was Never Here: A pilot gives Robert a lift to a secret French mercenary camp in the Congo. The pilot tells Robert when to meet him for the return, then says that if anything goes wrong, "You've never seen me before, ok?"
- Longing Look: The look Candice gives to Robert after they return to France. She left the plane first because Catherine is there waiting to pick up her husband. She makes it through customs, then sends a longing look at Robert as he greets his wife and leaves.
- Maintain the Lie: Robert goes to extraordinary lengths to hide his affair from Catherine, making up fake business trips, arranging for timely phone calls, fixing alibis with his friends. At one point he pretends that he has to leave Amsterdam to go back to Paris for work, but instead never leaves and spends a few days in Amsterdam with Candice. When Catherine comes to the Amsterdam train station to welcome him back, Robert goes to the station, gets into the train from the other side, walks through, gets out, and greets Catherine.
- The Mistress: 41-year-old Robert lands himself a 22-year-old mistress in the person of Candice the fashion model.
- Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: Candice is fluent in French but can't hide her accent. At their first meeting she tells Robert "You're a funny guy", and he shoots back "You're a funny American."
- Rom Com Job: It isn't a comedy, but Robert is a documentarian and TV war correspondent, while Candice is a fashion model.
- Shower of Love: An outdoor shower of love, no less, as Robert and Candice are canoodling in an outdoor camp shower in Africa.
- Shower Scene: Robert's extremely good-looking girlfriend Mirelle is showering in a hotel room (seen through frosted glass). What makes this more amusing is at the same time Robert is in the foreground, asking the desk clerk to arrange a fake phone call so he has an excuse to leave.
- Stock Footage: Plenty of this throughout—some of which seems to be from Robert's career as a documentarian but some of which seems to be random. In any case there footage of Mao and Chiang, the Nazis, war crimes, and other horrors. One particularly disturbing clip shows a Real Life example of a man getting executed by firing squad. All the stock footage has basically no relevance to the rest of the movie.
