A trial run for one of the most famous scenes in Breathless, Jean-Luc Godard’s Charlotte and Her Boyfriend puts two people in a room but only lets one of them speak (non-stop) for 10 full minutes.
France
3*
Director:
Jean-Luc Godard
Screenwriter:
Jean-Luc Godard
Director of Photography:
Michel Latouche
Running time: 13 minutes
Original title: Charlotte et son Jules
After the previous year’s lovely All the Boys Are Called Patrick, which Eric Rohmer, one of his colleagues at the Cahiers du cinéma, had written, Jean-Luc Godard tried his own hand at writing a short film. The product had a much more narrow focus but clearly never went through many drafts. Charlotte and Her Boyfriend is a stream-of-consciousness rant for a full 10 minutes in a confined space, and it loses steam very quickly.
It reunited Godard with Patrick‘s Anne Collette (whose character in that short had the same name) and features Jean-Paul Belmondo in one of his very first roles. Unfortunately for the director, Belmondo was called up to serve in the French army in Algeria shortly after the shoot. As a result, Godard filled in for him during post-production, so every time Belmondo speaks, it is Godard’s own voice, immediately recognisable by his higher pitch and slight lisp. It doesn’t fit Belmondo at all, although it does make the character sound fairly pathetic.
Collette plays the titular Charlotte, an aspiring actress who arrives at the apartment of her ex-boyfriend, a writer named Jules. It quickly becomes clear that she had left him, and he is still seething with rage. Serious about giving her a piece of his mind but unable to control his rage, he lashes out in a torrent of half-formed ideas that become more and more ridiculous as he spins out of control. All the while, she smiles, remains perfectly silent and is unaffected by this mood swings. It takes a very long 10 minutes, but ultimately, it is very satisfying to learn exactly why she decided to visit him.
While Jules moves passionately about his own apartment, marching back and forth with determination, Godard delivers the voice-over mechanically, like a robot half-awake. The film is clearly on Charlotte’s side, however. During the opening credits, the music only plays when the camera is on her, which turns to silence when there is a cut to Jules. Later on, when she tilts her head at him to the right or to the left, the camera tilts along with her. This perspective, as well as Jules’s non-stop, gradually less lucid verbal diarrhoea (he wants her to come back to him, but he keeps calling her an idiot), has a devastating effect on our perception of him.
The message almost seems to be that love drives one crazy. The film’s style emphasises this slight disconnect from reality, as we mostly see Charlotte and Jules visually separated by one-shots. This, in addition to Jules’s voice clearly coming from a voice-over that does not belong to the body we see on-screen, produces an odd discontinuity between sight and sound that is wholly appropriate to the story.
And yet, while Charlotte’s happy-go-lucky attitude offers a fresh contrast to Jules’s self-involved but utterly tedious diatribe, the film is mostly a bore and feels much longer than its brief running time. The setup obviously anticipates one of the best scenes in Breathless, in which Belmondo and Jean Seberg spend 20 minutes talking in a small apartment. But whereas Charlotte and Her Boyfriend is basically a monologue, delivered with a dubbed voice that lacks emotion, Breathless features two palpably living and breathing characters interacting with each other like real people. Charlotte and Jules, by contrast, very much remain rather shallow creatures of fiction.