A Bout de Souffle (Breathless)
1960
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
He loves her, or maybe he doesn’t. She loves him, or maybe she doesn’t. It ends badly, or maybe it doesn’t.
This is how Jean-Luc Godard pitched his first film, “Breathless” (1960), which he made on stolen money with borrowed equipment and the above mentioned script. Perhaps no other film has been more immediately revolutionary. With “Breathless” began the French New Wave and with Godard a handful of courageous filmmakers like Reno, Truffaut, and Varda devoted themselves to the movement.
The French New Wave was, in essence, the cinema of the self-aware. Movies that knew and acknowledged that they were movies, in other words. This was anarchic. Godard and Co. had originated as film critics, and were blurring the lines between theory and practice. By knowing all the rules, they knew precisely how to break them, and to great effect.
This is how Jean-Luc Godard pitched his first film, “Breathless” (1960), which he made on stolen money with borrowed equipment and the above mentioned script. Perhaps no other film has been more immediately revolutionary. With “Breathless” began the French New Wave and with Godard a handful of courageous filmmakers like Reno, Truffaut, and Varda devoted themselves to the movement.
The French New Wave was, in essence, the cinema of the self-aware. Movies that knew and acknowledged that they were movies, in other words. This was anarchic. Godard and Co. had originated as film critics, and were blurring the lines between theory and practice. By knowing all the rules, they knew precisely how to break them, and to great effect.
With “Breathless”, Godard crafted a movie that knew precisely what it was expected to be, and did something else. Its characters lacked sentiment, their love lacked sincerity, its editing lacked continuity, and its tone lacked emotional cues. These are not faults. They are stylistic decisions. “Breathless” is infinitely entertaining because it reveals itself as a movie spitting in the face of movies.
Look at Jean-Paul Belmondo in the lead role as Michel Poiccard and you see the likes of De Niro, Pacino, and Nicholson in embryo. America had seen its share of suave gangsters by 1960. James Dean and Marlon Brando were huge successes in the 40’s and 50’s, but they were tragic antiheroes. Belmondo plays Michel as a sniveling punk trying to conceal his naivety with an excess of testosterone. He was an indictment of masculinity, not a glorification of it.
Godard once said that all you need to make a successful movie is a girl and a gun, and “Breathless” is composed of nothing else. In the film’s first five minutes, Michel steals a car (exhibiting his nihilistic sexism by leaving his female accomplice in the parking lot), takes a joy ride out in the country, finds a gun in the glove box, gets pulled over, shoots the cop, flees back to town, and tries to convince his love interest Patrica (Jean Seberg) to run away with him to Rome. A girl and a gun.
There are many scenes in the film in which Michel and Patricia are alone in cars and bedrooms simply talking to one another about nothing in particular. Their conversations have a sort of music to them. Listen to the way they volley their indifference toward one another back and forth. There’s something kind of touching in the way they both try to push each other away, while still openly desiring the other’s company.
Look at Jean-Paul Belmondo in the lead role as Michel Poiccard and you see the likes of De Niro, Pacino, and Nicholson in embryo. America had seen its share of suave gangsters by 1960. James Dean and Marlon Brando were huge successes in the 40’s and 50’s, but they were tragic antiheroes. Belmondo plays Michel as a sniveling punk trying to conceal his naivety with an excess of testosterone. He was an indictment of masculinity, not a glorification of it.
Godard once said that all you need to make a successful movie is a girl and a gun, and “Breathless” is composed of nothing else. In the film’s first five minutes, Michel steals a car (exhibiting his nihilistic sexism by leaving his female accomplice in the parking lot), takes a joy ride out in the country, finds a gun in the glove box, gets pulled over, shoots the cop, flees back to town, and tries to convince his love interest Patrica (Jean Seberg) to run away with him to Rome. A girl and a gun.
There are many scenes in the film in which Michel and Patricia are alone in cars and bedrooms simply talking to one another about nothing in particular. Their conversations have a sort of music to them. Listen to the way they volley their indifference toward one another back and forth. There’s something kind of touching in the way they both try to push each other away, while still openly desiring the other’s company.
In the end, Patricia commits a fatal act of betrayal that doesn’t feel at all like betrayal. It feels almost playful in its spontaneity, as though it was just another volley in the game she and Michel were perpetually involved in.
“Breathless” was, in many ways, the only narrative film that Godard made. He gravitated quickly toward what he called “political cinema”, which dealt more with concept than it did with plot. As his career progressed, he slowly got farther and farther ahead of himself. He devoted a decade to his opus “Histoire du Cinema”, and has been ostensibly lost ever since. But there’s a romantic anarchy to his early films, which were alive with his love and understanding of the cinema, before he became desensitized to it.
There is a game that Michel plays with Patricia a couple times in “Breathless”. He calls it “Sour Apples”. He makes a series of exaggerated faces, giant grins, scowls, and wide eyes, all of them enthusiastic, but none of them sincere. That little game, in so many ways, is precisely what “Breathless” is all about.
“Breathless” was, in many ways, the only narrative film that Godard made. He gravitated quickly toward what he called “political cinema”, which dealt more with concept than it did with plot. As his career progressed, he slowly got farther and farther ahead of himself. He devoted a decade to his opus “Histoire du Cinema”, and has been ostensibly lost ever since. But there’s a romantic anarchy to his early films, which were alive with his love and understanding of the cinema, before he became desensitized to it.
There is a game that Michel plays with Patricia a couple times in “Breathless”. He calls it “Sour Apples”. He makes a series of exaggerated faces, giant grins, scowls, and wide eyes, all of them enthusiastic, but none of them sincere. That little game, in so many ways, is precisely what “Breathless” is all about.
Rollan Schott
November 20, 2009
Originally Featured in the Daily Nebraskan
0 comments:
Post a Comment