Jean-Luc Godard

Breathless (1960)

André Crous

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.

BreathlessFrance
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.

Charlotte and Her Boyfriend (1958)

André Crous

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.

Charlotte et son JulesFrance
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.

The Carabineers (1963)

André Crous

The Carabineers has a thought or two about wars and the people who fight them but is mostly just an excuse for Jean-Luc Godard to separate image and sound from each other.

Les carabiniersFrance
3.5*

Director:
Jean-Luc Godard
Screenwriters:
Jean Gruault
Roberto Rossellini
Director of Photography:
Raoul Coutard

Running time: 85 minutes

Original title: Les carabiniers

There are moments in Jean-Luc Godard’s The Carabineers when it seems the director is about to say something of real importance about the immorality of warfare or the pointlessness of killing one’s fellow men and women. But no. Nine times out of ten, he would rather engage in experimental (mostly audio, sometimes visual) gimmicks. As a result, the film ends up being about as ineffectual as its dimwitted central characters.

The opening screen may be the most important of the entire enterprise. Quoting Jorge Luis Borges in a 1963 interview with Madeleine Chapsal from L’Express, a handwritten title card informs us that “More and more, I’m striving for simplicity. I use worn metaphors. Basically, that’s what is eternal. For example, stars resemble eyes, or death is like sleep.” Given the eccentric behaviour of its characters and the minimalist sets they inhabit, Godard’s film can’t be considered even remotely realistic. This quotation seems the best possible key to understanding the film as a kind of macabre caricature of reality, closer to theatre than cinema.

For one thing, the main characters are two brothers inexplicably called Ulysses and Michelangelo. One of them is married to a vampy but rather dishevelled woman named Cleopatra, the other to a Venus. No one resembles their literary or historical namesake in the slightest. It is possible Godard simply attributed high and mighty names to these floundering fools as a way of extending the film’s attitude toward war in general – an activity that, after all, is often described in undeservedly glowing terms.

Godard, whose The Little Soldier (Le petit soldat) – made in 1961 but not released until 1963 – already showcased the director’s ambivalent (to say the least) relationship to war, disabuses the viewer very quickly of any notion that warfare is heroic. In the opening scene, riflemen arrive at a dilapidated house in the middle of nowhere (the surroundings are more barren than the moonscape) to deliver a letter from the king to draft Ulysses and Michelangelo into the army. Importantly, we are never told what country or which ideals they are fighting to protect, nor who the enemy is. But one of the carabineers (riflemen) tells the young men they may do whatever they want because “in war, anything goes”. And this is where Godard lands his most direct blow:

Michelangelo: I got a question.
Carabineer: Go ahead.
M.: In the war, can we take slot machines?
C.: Yes.
M.: No charges if we take old men’s eyeglasses? Can we break a kid’s arm? Both arms? Stab a guy in the back? Rob apartments? Burn towns? Burn women?
C.: Yes.
M.: And steal classy trousers?
C.: Yes.
M.: If we want, we can massacre innocent folks?
C.: Yes.
M.: Denounce folks, too?
C.: Yes.
M.: Eat in restaurants without paying?
C.: Yes, yes. That’s war.

As usual with Godard, the point could have been made much more succinctly, but it still lands. And soon, egged on by Cleopatra and Venus who see dollar signs where others see violence and bloodshed, the two men are off to war. What follows are snippets of life on the front. One of the biggest action scenes involves a lone tank driving around an ashen countryside with fewer than 10 riflemen in tow. We hear a lot of gunfire but see almost nothing. From time to time, a bomb explodes in the fields, but no one is injured. The representation is clearly theatrical and not meant to be taken as a realistic depiction.

Unfortunately, Godard’s distinct brand of alienation continuously prevents us from becoming emotionally involved. Everyone is shot offscreen or shown getting killed very far away. Onscreen excerpts from the soldiers’ letters back home speak of incredible violence (“We rip women’s rings from their fingers and make people undress before shooting them, naked, next to an anti-tank trap”), but we never witness any of this. Perhaps the men are lying, or perhaps Godard is too busy reinventing the war film to realise a fully functional machine (a story told on film) is more interesting than seeing it disassembled, rearranged and barely operational.

Not only is the violence made banal by being presented in its separate audio and visual components, but there is not a single recognisable human soul we can empathise with. Confronted with loud shots of gunfire but rarely seeing guns being fired or people getting killed, we feel nothing. The presentation of a near-rape is so matter-of-fact it is almost comical, and Godard’s willingness to steer us in this direction is monstrous.

Moreover, the film does not contain a shred of everyday humanity. When the men return home at the end of their tour, they are emotionless. Cleopatra and Venus, who have been cheating on them, show no emotion either. For nearly 10 minutes, they throw some postcards around, which appear as stand-ins for the real things, but what exactly Godard is trying to say about this blurry distinction between life and representation is unclear. Earlier in the film, Michelangelo had saluted a Rembrandt self-portrait, and Ulysses was mesmerised by Barnaba da Modena’s painting of “Madonna and Child”, but everything feels terribly ad hoc, not part of a larger, well-developed message.

After an extensive mish-mash of scenes from the “battlefield”, the story comes to an abrupt conclusion, closely following in the footsteps of Godard’s previous feature, My Life to Live. In this respect, the film does tie itself tightly to the fate of its characters: When it ends, their story ends; and thus, they must end, as well. While far from unappealing, The Carabineers lacks characters for us to become attached to, and ultimately, this mostly feels like just another contrarian exercise for the director to amuse himself with.

All the Boys Are Called Patrick (1957)

André Crous

The Rohmer-scripted All the Boys Are Called Patrick is among the most straightforward, playful films of Godard’s oeuvre, although the number of references to the world of film already start to pile up. 

All the Boys Are Called PatrickFrance
4*

Director:
Jean-Luc Godard
Screenwriter:
Eric Rohmer
Director of Photography:
Michel Latouche

Running time: 20 minutes

Original title: Tous les garçons s’appellent Patrick
Alternate title: Véronique et Charlotte, ou Tous les garçons s’appellent Patrick

With two rather conventional début films – a documentary (about the construction of a dam in southern Switzerland) and a genuinely delightful short (about a woman deciding to spice up her life by engaging in some prostitution) – under his belt, Jean-Luc Godard embarked on his next project in the autumn of 1957. Shot on 35 mm, the result was All the Boys Are Called Patrick, 20 minutes in length and based on a screenplay by that great fanatic of dialogue, Eric Rohmer. Although unexpectedly cute for a Godard production, it clearly anticipated the budding director’s future (pre)occupation with films and form.

The titular Patrick is actually just one playboy who chats up and arranges to hook up with every girl he meets. What makes this story so interesting is that the two girls he happens to cross minutes apart one afternoon are roommates, and it is a shrewd idea to give them different perspectives on being flirted with. However, while the central narrative idea is wonderful, everything that Godard was responsible for (most notably, the multiple references to art and other films) makes this immediately recognisable as the work of a young film enthusiast rather than a director.

Véronique (Nicole Berger) and Charlotte (Anne Collette) are two young women sharing a flat in Paris’s Montparnasse district. Véronique has a lunchtime appointment but tells Charlotte they can meet up at the Luxembourg Gardens between 2 and 3 o’clock. Charlotte, who reads Hegel in the morning and flips through some pulp fiction (The Fate of the Immodest Blonde, which Godard probably chose because it was written by Patrick Quentin) over lunch, is immediately hit upon when she arrives in the public park.

The chatty flirt is called Patrick (played by Jean-Claude Brialy), who is clearly as shallow as a puddle but spouts off multiple references to the world of film in an attempt to impress her. Pretending to speak Japanese, for example, he merely drops the names of two of the era’s foremost directors from the Land of the Rising Sun: “Mizoguchi-Kurosawa?” It would not be a leap to equate the character with Godard himself, although Brialy is infinitely better-looking.

Charlotte eventually acquiesces to having a quick coffee with him. At the café, the two share a table next to a man whose face is buried in a copy of Arts, whose cover provocatively proclaims that “French cinema is dying under false legends”. This article by François Truffaut appeared in May of that year. Patrick persists with the falsehoods as he claims to be studying law, although the film slyly reveals that he has a geometry textbook. Despite herself, Charlotte ultimately arranges a date with him the following evening.

Moments after parting, Patrick runs into Véronique, who is just returning from the Luxembourg Gardens where Charlotte was nowhere to be found. All but beating her into submission to have a drink, they go to another nearby café, where Patrick runs through more or less the same lines as before (he told Charlotte it has been a month since he has picked up a girl and tells Véronique it has been a year) but somehow scores another date out of this forced meeting. The atmosphere of widespread cinephilia evolves as Véronique is also carrying around a copy of Cahiers du cinéma (it’s the July 1957 edition, with Orson Welles on the cover; later in the film, the magazine’s co-founder, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, also gets a shout-out).

Fortunately, unlike many of the director’s later films, this is the work of someone gingerly experimenting with the medium and not yet trying to steamroll over its conventional form. While the editing is rather thrown together, there is still very much a story to latch onto here, and Rohmer, in particular, deserves our gratitude for keeping the dialogue snappy and spontaneous. 

All the Boys Are Called Patrick lags a bit in the second half, when Godard’s camera starts fixating on unnecessary details like the promotional poster for a Pablo Picasso exhibition (perhaps because Patrick, Pablo and the focal point of “Portrait of Paulo” all share the same first two letters, “Pa-“? I wouldn’t put such inanity past Godard) or a giant movie poster for Rebel Without a Cause that the girls have in their bathroom.

However, the verbal sparring keeps our interest, as the action we witness turns ever more complicated thanks to the way the girls tell each other about their respective Patrick. We know the truth, but it is fascinating to see them hiding and altering details about him to impress or slightly put down the other. One says he looks like Cary Grant, the other like the new American actor, Anthony something (presumably Anthony Perkins). Charlotte says she found Patrick incredibly interesting, and Véronique pretends she hates Coca-Cola, while the real events tell a very different story. There is something Rashomon-like about their interaction, albeit with fewer details and more uncertainty about the direction. 

The lack of firm direction from behind the camera is most evident in the endings of many scenes, which often consist of the characters laughing nonsensically at a non-existent joke. However, the story’s three-part structure is sublime in both its simplicity and efficacy. And despite the constant repetition of Beethoven’s “Rondo a capriccio in G Major” on the soundtrack and the camera’s unplanned (or badly executed) movements, the story loses almost none of its appeal, and the climax immediately gives way to the END intertitle. A perfect conclusion to a thoroughly enjoyable 20 minutes.

A Flirtatious Woman (1955)

André Crous

Devoid of the director’s usual pretentiousness, Jean-Luc Godard’s very first fiction short, A Flirtatious Woman, may just be one of the best films he ever created.

Une femme coquetteFrance
4.5*

Director:
Jean-Luc Godard
Screenwriter:
Jean-Luc Godard
Director of Photography:
Jean-Luc Godard

Running time: 9 minutes

Original title: Une femme coquette

Made with just a borrowed 16 mm camera and no money, A Flirtatious Woman was Jean-Luc Godard’s first foray into fiction filmmaking. The 24-year-old had shot a 20-minute documentary, Operation Concrete (Opération béton), the previous year, but intrigued by a Maupassant short story entitled “The Signal”, in which a married woman tries her hand at prostitution, he wrote an adaptation and filmed it without any dialogue on the streets of Geneva.

Except for the use of the voice-over and the primary focus on a female character, this feels nothing like a Godard film, which is precisely why it is so good. Technically, it was directed by “Hans Lucas”, Godard’s chosen pseudonym, which he also used on occasion as a byline for his work in the Cahiers du cinéma. The film is not weighed down by film references or political statements, and there are no silly attempts to re-invent film grammar. The French New Wave’s fascination with Hitchcock and with Bernanos via Bresson subtly infuses the narrative without ever overtaking it, and what we get is a thoroughly enjoyable, tightly focused, well-executed film with a central character who justifies her actions intelligently and with a human voice. This cannot be said of the bulk of Godard’s subsequent films. although the film does anticipate Godard’s fixation on prostitution.

In the first and last scenes, we see a young woman, Agnès (Maria Lysandre), writing a letter to her friend, Françoise. The letter is a full confession of the adultery she has committed, which we see in the flashback constituting the main body of the film. The voice-over is very clearly the words written in the letter, but even though this is a verbalisation of written material, the message is conveyed realistically and compellingly. This does not feel like something written down and read for the benefit of the viewer. Many of Godard’s feature films suffer from the burden of being lectures rather than stories. That is certainly not the case here.

Agnès recounts how she was on her way home one day to prepare lunch for her husband when she noticed a woman on a balcony. The woman was well-dressed and gave a warm smile to every man passing on the street below. Young, old, handsome, ugly… she didn’t discriminate. At one point, a serious young chain-smoker with sunglasses (a 25-year-old-going-on-45-year-old Jean-Luc Godard) noticed her, kept looking towards her and noticed she continued to smile at him. He went up, she went inside, and 15 minutes later, he came back out. Agnès is so thrilled by this overt display of flirtatiousness that she innocently dips her toe into the pool of prostitution, too.

On the Île Rousseau, a small island in the middle of Geneva, she approaches a man reading a newspaper on a bench. He peeks at him, again and again. This sustained series of shots culminates in the man being so taken with her coy glances that rushes towards her with a frenzied lust he can no longer control. After all, men are very simple creatures – if anyone good-looking shows the slightest bit of interest in them, they easily turn to putty. Surprised that her ruse was so successful, and also a little shocked by the passion she managed to rouse, Agnès runs back home. But the man pursues her by car, and when he catches up with her, he offers 50 francs (around $250 today) for the pleasure of her company. She doesn’t say no.

A Flirtatious Woman does not contain any dialogue or diegetic sounds. The soundtrack consists exclusively of Agnès’s voice-over reading of the confessional letter, along with bits and pieces of Bach playing continuously throughout. The narration is compelling not only because it comments on the action but also because it informs us about the narrator’s state of mind. Moreover, the words come across as spoken rather than read, which adds dynamism to this part of the soundtrack. The cinematography and the editing both seem a bit flimsy and thrown together from whatever footage Godard managed to collect, but the film’s appeal comes from its simple story told in a compelling way – largely thanks to the voice work, for which I presume the credit goes to actress Maria Lysandre.

Except for the Bach (mostly the “Brandenburg Concertos”) constantly blaring on the soundtrack, this is a wonderful piece of work. It may lack the formal playfulness and the philosophising we tend to associate with Godard, but the film is all the better for it. If only he had kept this up in his later work, though without appearing in them to the same extent as here (this is not merely a Hitchcockian cameo but a major character role), his motion pictures may have been infinitely more relatable.