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BOUT DE SOUFFLE
(BREATHLESS)
9/10
Fr
1959, dir. Jean-Luc Godard, 89m
Paris, 1959:
you are there. Michel, A charismatic young hot-head (Jean-Paul Belmondo)
has killed a cop in Marseilles and fled to the capital to hide out with
Patricia, his on-off American girlfriend (Jean Seberg). As the authorities
close in, Michel and Patricia’s relationship comes under increasing pressure…
But Breathless
isn’t regarded as a cinematic landmark because of its plot, which could
most charitably described as flimsy. Debutant director Godard set out
with the express intention of making a movie “as if no-one had ever made
one before,” and he succeeded. Before Breathless, most pictures
were just filmed scripts – Godard wanted instead to make his
film represent his view of the world: jagged, fresh, unorthodox,
unpredictable. He ended up inventing a new way of telling a story through
film – abrupt jump-cuts through time and space, improvisations, no establishing
shots, a reliance on natural light and settings – that broke many cinematic
rules and dared audiences to keep up, setting off a whole Nouvelle
Vague of European cinema. Forty years on, the Godard’s effect is visible
in just about every American or European film, but Godard’s innovations
are now taken so much for granted that when they’re foregrounded – as
in the Danish dogme films – we’re once again taken aback.
Most of Breathless
still seems incredibly fresh, especially Coutard’s try-anything camerawork
– you can feel Godard’s excitement as he pushes back boundary after boundary.
But the script isn’t anything like as accomplished as the direction: while
Belmondo’s remains an irresistible beat-punk characterisation, Seberg’s
Patricia doesn’t come into anywhere near as sharp a focus. This causes
problems when, in the second half of the film, the emphasis shifts away
from him and onto her.
The final
image of the film is of Patricia as she turns her back on the camera,
and because the psychology of the character is still muddy, there isn’t
much of a satisfying kick - unlike Jim McBride’s otherwise-inferior 1983
remake with Richard Gere, which went out on a blazingly dynamic freeze-frame
that works ten times better.
Even more
distracting is the relentless, repetitive jazzy score Godard lathers over
just about every scene, possibly to hide the fact that all the sound had
to be recorded after the images. This is the one element of the film which
has dated badly, especially placed alongside Louis Malle’s collaboration
with Miles Davis in another 50s Parisian thriller, 1957’s Lift to the
Scaffold, where the music and the movie fused into a cohesive organic
whole.
Godard is
also guilty of miscalculation when he allows a bedroom two-hander between
Belmondo and Seberg about half an hour in to run on and on and on, when
the film is otherwise all about speed and energy, sharp edges and quick
emotions. There’s a similar scene towards the end which is much more satisfying
– the camera follows first one character then the other, their dialogue
overlapping, Altman-style, and we get a real sense of communication breakdown.
It’s at moments
like these – other highlights include speed-loving Belmondo cursing slow
drivers in his car, Seberg attending a bizarre airport press-conference
with a self-important novelist - that Breathless becomes something
special, something just that little bit different from other movies. Godard’s
achievement is to convey a real sense of immediacy and spontaneousness,
while carefully and rigorously exploring ideas.
The meaning
of words is always being questioned – Patricia is always asking for tricky
phrases to be clairified, and Michel delights in the most current of street
slang: to a phone operator, he says nonante for 90, instead of
the more polite mouthful quatre-vingt-dix. (This aspect of the
film allows me to digress: why ‘Breathless’ for ‘A Bout de Souffle’? ‘Out
of Breath’ would be more accurate, but even then, which of the characters
is ever even ‘winded’ – only the ever-hurrying cops, as far as I can tell).
Language,
like identity, nationality, and cinema, is volatile, fluid, open to sudden
change. It’s no coincidence that so many of the characters have foreign
names – Patricia’s surname is Franchini, Michel’s main underworld contacts
are called Berrutti and Tolmatchoff, the novelist is called Parvulesco
– or that so many of these either have strong non-French accents, or else
dip in and out of foreign languages: Michel, who has just returned from
a trip to the Rome film studio Cinecitta, dots his conversation with Italian
phrases.
The Cinecitta
reference points up another of the frameworks which bind together Godard’s
apparently haphazard constructions. Breathless is, if nothing else,
a celebration of cinema itself – its history as well as its potential
future. The film, dedicated to low-rent Hollywood studio Monogram Picture,
is full of overt cinematic references – Belmondo stands transfixed before
a poster of Humphrey Bogart in his last movie, The Harder They Fall,
and imitates his thumbnail-across-the-lips gesture. He cheekily rebuffs
a girl trying to sell him a copy of Cahiers du Cinema, the film
journal to which Godard was a regular contributor, and later, fleeing
the cops, takes Patricia to the movies.
But not all
audiences would know that Laszlo Kovacs, Michel’s pseudonym, was the name
of a noted Hollywood cameraman, or that Michel himself is supposed to
be the son of the lovers in the Jean Vigo’s 1930s classic L’Atalante,
or that the actor playing philosophical novelist Parvulesco is none other
than director Jean-Pierre Melville.
Ultimately
what’s great about Breathless is the fact that it works just as
well for the audience in search of a sexy, romantic thriller as it does
for those in search of cinematic innovation and philosophical enquiry.
Godard brings to vivid life a specific time, a specific place – a cinematic
world, and for an hour and a half, you’re inside that world. If you can,
see Breathless in a cinema, in the middle of a bustling city. Coming
out of the darkness into the light, you may well find that the street
looks different: through new eyes, it looks better.
Click
here for a 1970 interview (not by me!) with Jean-Luc Godard.
by Neil
Young
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