Sixty years after its release and after inspiring generations of aspring directors, Breathless continues to dazzle with its gentle undermining of conventions and wonderful central performances.
France
5*
Director:
Jean-Luc Godard
Screenwriter:
Jean-Luc Godard
Director of Photography:
Raoul Coutard
Running time: 90 minutes
Original title: À bout de souffle
Jean, Jean-Paul and Jean-Luc comprised the coolest trio of 1960, and their lively shenanigans demolished post-war French cinema in one fell swoop. But we shouldn’t discount the influence of another Jean – documentary filmmaker Jean Rouch – whose cinematic grammar ended up marking a turning point in the global motion picture industry.
Above all, Breathless is remembered for introducing the world to the jump cut. By cutting out the silence in a scene of dialogue, or pretending like one steady stream of dialogue is happening even as we can see the setting change, Jean-Luc Godard infused his début feature with a dynamism that was revolutionary. Rouch had used the jump cut a few months earlier during a long dialogue scene in I, a Negro (Moi, un noir), but it was Godard who used it to unforgettable effect.
Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo star as Patricia and Michel, a young couple still trying to figure out how they feel about each other after three weeks together. The former is an American journalist who walks up and down the Champs-Elysées selling the New York Herald Tribune; the latter is a young Frenchman involved in a vague criminal enterprise – when we meet him in the opening scene, he has just stolen a car in Marseille. Later, on his way to Paris, he kills a policeman on the highway. The film is dedicated to Monogram Pictures, a Hollywood film studio that had gone under a few years earlier but used to produce very low-budget films, including several with detective Charlie Chan (always played by a white actor in yellowface).
But while the romance is front and centre, thanks in large part to a stunningly choreographed 20-minute scene in a hotel bedroom, all the talk is about the film’s subtle undermining of conventions. Its anti-establishment gimmicks, including the jump cuts and the breaking of the fourth wall, are all very subtle but set the film apart from anything else while fully maintaining its accessibility. Some scenes are dynamic while fully realised in an unbroken take; others maintain their verbal coherence despite multiple cuts. Amazingly for a Godard film, Breathless even contains a few pretty helicopter shots of the sights in Paris.
Michel, who uses the pseudonym László Kovács (one of many cinematic references: Belmondo had played a character by this name the year before in Claude Chabrol’s suspense production, Web of Passion), spends the whole film trying to evade capture by the police. In an early scene, he walks past a poster for Robert Aldrich’s Ten Seconds to Hell, which urges the reader to “Live dangerously to the very end”. Moments later, a young girl hawking copies of the Cahiers du cinéma (specifically, the July 1959 issue with a still from Hiroshima mon amour on the cover) asks him whether he has anything against the youth, to which he replies that he likes the older ones, presumably also referring to movies.
But the girl he is interested in is Seberg’s Patricia, who is beautiful and has a confidence that belies her age – both the actress and her character were only 20 at the time. Her American accent may be appalling (among other cringeworthy inflections, she keeps pronouncing Paris as “Perree”), but he is so smitten with her, he only corrects her once. She also yearns for a “Romeo and Juliet” relationship, blissfully unaware of how the play ends.
Michel, presumably a vessel for Godard who grew up in Switzerland, sometimes pronounces numbers in the Swiss way and gushes about the beauty of girls all along Lake Geneva. Despite his chain smoking, despite the annoying affectation he has of stroking his lips with his finger and despite his criminality, we are drawn to him because in times of crisis he is cool as a cucumber. And after he spends 20 minutes in Patricia’s bed, most of it shirtless, it’s difficult to find him anything except irresistible.
Setting nearly a quarter of one’s story in the bedroom is a bold but very risky move. The number of possible shots seems limited, and without any major action, the viewer could easily get bored or frustrated. Two years earlier, in his short film Charlotte and Her Boyfriend, Godard had put Belmondo in a shoebox-sized studio apartment and let his character vent for 10 minutes at a mostly silent ex-girlfriend. The result was tedious in form and substance, and it was only half the length of the bedroom scene in Breathless. But here the director finds multiple points of interest to keep us enthralled, seemingly with the greatest of ease.
It is worth noting that, despite its air of improvisation and free-spirited nature, the film clearly had a screenplay. For example, the word “dégueulasse”, which is so critical to boosting the ambiguity of the final scene, appears here and there throughout the film. In that final scene, Godard brilliantly captures the confusion of the moment by having Belmondo pronounce a mixture of “tu es dégueulasse” (you’re disgusting) and “c’est dégueulasse” (this is terrible). There are no clear answers, and our efforts to understand what is happening neatly dovetail with Patricia’s own bewilderment (“What is ‘dégueulasse’?”).
What makes Breathless so appealing to so many people is that it simultaneously makes us think we can make a film like that and is almost transcendental in its coolness. It openly cops to being a film, and to being a film influenced by other films. But the combination of energy and introspection, of long takes and jump cuts and of shooting on the street while being very well thought out (see a stunningly framed shot taken from a taxi here) makes for an unforgettably visceral experience. Having the spectre of death hang over such lively proceedings only adds to the film’s enigma. It is no surprise that Patricia looks directly at us when a writer she interviews (played by French director-producer Jean-Pierre Melville) tells her about his greatest ambition: “To become immortal, and then, die.”
Allegedly miffed at the film’s global success, Godard would never again make anything else that comes even close to being this thrilling.