Deja View

Breathless | A Bout De Souffle (1960)

DIRECTOR: Jean Luc-Godard
COUNTRY: France
WRITERS: Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut
EDITING: Cecile Decugis, Lila Herman
CAST: Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean Seberg
GENRE: Crime, romance, new wave
MISCELLANY: 90m; in French with subtitles

Upon its release in 1960, Jean-Luc Godard's "Breathless" must have seemed, especially to American viewers, to be a truly revolutionary piece of filmmaking. Here was a work that was somewhat experimental in style, yet simultaneously traditional in narrative. Godard had taken the American gangster movie and reinvented it, turning the conventions of the genre on their head, while still managing to pay loving homage to it. The film, influenced by the gritty works of Sam Fuller and John Huston, itself became widely influential, and is regarded as the most seminal, accessible film in the New Wave canon.

The hard-boiled anti-hero, Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo), is a chain-smoking car thief who worships Humphrey Bogart and swaggers through the film with sunglasses on and a Trilby hat pulled insolently down over his brow. The obsession with the cynical, sardonic Bogart is an appropriate one, as Bogart and his noir dwelling tough guys are the natural precursors to Michel's laid-back killer. Michel nonchalantly plugs a policeman early in the film with the same indifference he seems to show throughout the film. As he admits to us at the start of the picture, setting the irreverent tone: "So, I'm a son of a bitch. After all, it's gotta be done. It has to." Although neither Michel or his flighty American girlfriend Patricia (Jean Seberg) are particularly likable characters, we find ourselves, if not exactly rooting for them, strangely fascinated by their lives, which are alternately gripping and mundane. As Patricia puts it, "I'd like to know what’s behind that face of yours." Whether there is, in actuality, anything more to Michel than what he has cultivated from movies and popular culture is open to debate. Whether the two are fleeing the cops or engaging in existential banter in Patricia's apartment, there is something perversely hypnotizing about this unlikely duo. While watching them, I was reminded somewhat of the blank-faced honeymoon killers in "Badlands" (1973) — neither are exceptionally sympathetic leads, yet we are never less than enthralled with their performances.

When Patricia ultimately betrays Michel, tipping the police off to his whereabouts, she does so with the same cool indifference with which she rejects his repeated amorous advances in her apartment. When Michel is gunned down by the police, instead of the expected deathbed soliloquy, Belmondo rather anti-climactically revisits his “sour apples” series of facial expressions, after exhaling one final time from his ubiquitous cigarette.

Though they are both somewhat shallow, callous individuals, there is a playful, winning quality to their interactions with each other, and the script, also by Godard from a treatment by Francois Truffaut, is full of knowing asides and witty bits of repartee that help paint a more sympathetic, well-rounded portrait of the doomed young lovers.

The real innovations of "Breathless," however, lie not in the performances but in the look of the film itself. Godard utilizes natural sound and hand-held camera to give the film a gritty, cinema verite feel, and this off-the-cuff, freewheeling style provides a unique contrast to the hip dialogue and groundbreaking jump cuts, the latter of which enraged cinema purists and critics upon the film's release, but would become commonplace in the years to come. These seemingly arbitrary quick edits were appropriated, far less effectively, by Dennis Hopper in "Easy Rider" (1969). Coincidentally, or not, the director of photography on "Easy Rider" is Laszlo Kovacs, Michel's alias in "Breathless." This is only one of several film culture references in "Breathless." In addition to the above mentioned homage to Bogart, the camera lingers over a Jack Palance movie poster, Michel and Patricia watch "Westbound" (1959), Patricia hangs a poster of an August Renoir painting in her apartment (Renoir's filmmaker son Jean was an acknowledged influence on Godard), and a girl on the street attempts (unsuccessfully) to sell Michel a copy of Cahiers du Cinema, a film magazine for which Godard, and many of the other New Wave auteurs, wrote for before becoming filmmakers. Also, Godard himself has a cameo in the film as an informant, and the director Jean-Pierre Melville plays a famous writer being interviewed by Seberg.

Godard's use of natural sound reaches its almost absurd peak during the scenes in Patricia's apartment, in which the wailing sirens wafting in through the open window actually drown out the characters' dialogue. Rather than being a distraction that takes the viewer out of the moment, the use of natural sound here, and throughout the film, only heighten the realism. After all, in real life, in a bustling metropolis like Paris, one certainly would have to cope with the intrusive sounds of the city. At the same time, Godard utilizes several iris shots, whose glaring artificiality reminds us that this is a film. In one scene, Patricia peeks at Michel through a rolled up poster, and the camera switches to a peephole-style lens. Both Michel and Patricia talk to the camera, breaking down the so-called "fourth wall" that separates the audience from the actors. This device would become cliched and overused in time, but in 1960, it must have seemed positively revolutionary. Godard utilizes these techniques in several of his other films, including "Bande a Parte" (1964), in which Anna Karina often flashes a look or an exclamation at the audience. That film also takes the genre-reflexivity of "Breathless" to the ultimate degree when the three main characters wonder what a minute of silence would sound like, and then proceed to sit for a minute in complete silence — Godard even mutes the ambient audio.

To complete the almost documentary-style feel of "Breathless," passing extras often stare directly into the camera or at the actors. Also, characters sometimes interrupt and talk over each other — this overlapping dialogue would be quite influential on Robert Altman, whose films almost always employ it to some degree, most famously in "M*A*S*H" (1970). Godard also inserts several stylistic flourishes that might seem gimmicky and forced on paper, but that work perfectly within the context and tone of the film. As the police bear down on Michel, a neon sign in a window informs us that "the net tightens around Michel."

These scenes only serve to heighten the self-referential, knowing tone of "Breathless." The film is, in many ways, a tribute to film itself — Godard's valentine to cinema. The fact that the film influenced and inspired a generation of directors is cinema's valentine to Godard, and to "Breathless."
— Theo Wulff
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