LITTLE ROCK — Vivre dangereusement jusqu’au bout.
- “Live dangerously until the end,” the French title of the 1959 Robert Aldrich film 10 Seconds to Hell, seen on a poster in Breathless
Last month, the Criterion Collection issued a Blu-ray edition of Jean-Luc Godard’s A Bout de Souffle - the movie most of us know as Breathless ($39.95). It is the rarest kind of movie, a film that is reflexively described as “classic” yet retains its genuine power to thrill. Breathless (1960) is not a difficult movie to love and I am always surprised to encounter people who, having seen it, fail to love it.
I am aware that there are skeptics and agnostics and even critics who - having seen Breathless in all good faith - dislike the movie. I don’t mean to argue with them, if they don’t like the way the film is edited or the cryptic nature of the final lines or the quality of the acting. I half-agree with these criticisms, or at least I understand the points of those who make them. There is a haphazard, desultory quality to Breathless that may be due more to actual sloppiness than the studied authorial kind. Some lines seem stilted. The story is so simple that in some ways the movie reminds me of a kind of short film one often sees at film festivals - the kind where the (inevitably young) filmmakers are so anxious to commit something to film that they don’t bother much with writing.
Yet, these intellectual problems are dissolved by the power of the movie itself, by the romance of Breathless. It was, after all, Godard’s first film, the practical application of his theory. It was intended as revolutionary cinema - as an anti-movie movie, a blow against the petty tyrannies of conventional storytelling. It is meant as a refutation of cinematic serious and even its detractors must concede it succeeds in subverting the expectations of its audience. Even after the 10th - or 50th - viewing, Breathless feels cheeky. Punk.
It begins abruptly with our young anti-hero Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo) stealing a car in Marseilles, shooting dead the policeman who pursues him. He hides out in Paris, taking up with a young American Patricia (Jean Seberg), who sells the New York Herald Tribune on the middle of the Champs Elysees while waiting for her big break in journalism.
Patricia isn’t terribly interested in Michel, although she finds him an interesting diversion, and carries on with him as he tries to track down a man who owes him money. He wants Patricia to run away with him to Italy, but when the cops begin to close in, she goes to the police and informs on him. They shoot him to death in the street, and with his last breath, he calls her - or the world at large- a vile name. But he’s smirking as he does this, so perhaps it’s just his final joke.
But the story - which bears a strong resemblance to the basic plot of Joseph H. Lewis’ low-budget noir Gun Crazy (1949) - isn’t the point of Breathless. (Neither is the acting, although Seberg is superbly cast. Belmondo would go on to prove himself a wonderfully subtle performer. All he’s required to do here is pose.)
Breathless is best understood as a kind of visual poem, an experiment with motion and light. Its least compelling elements are those that echo other movies - the stock footage of Paris seems imported from another world - and the movie is at its best when it rejects logic for a kind of dream sense.
Breathless is famous for its jump-cuts, the stuttering, quick edits that Godard (and maybe more importantly cinematographer Raoul Coutard) used to camouflage the film’s limitations. While Godard did not start the project planning to edit it this way, the filmmakers soon realized they could use the cuts to hide problems with lighting and sound, and even to modulate performances. Once they hit upon this, they employed the cuts throughout the movie, creating a kind of cubist temporality, a way of suggesting the world as it is perceived in motion.
Patricia and Michel are not realistic characters, they’re tropes who aren’t required to behave as rational actors. Michel in particular is a hollow man, a callow idiot obsessed with American pulp, particularly Humphrey Bogart. One imagines that he’s the kind of dolt Godard imagined he might have been without the intervening intelligence. Michel isn’t a character to believe in so much as identify with.
What is important is the style - or the rejection of style that became the style. Breathless is a kind of collage film, a collection of images and allusions to film history, a document of a specific time, place and mindset that has, over the years, acquired a patina of seriousness the filmmakers never intended.The notion that people might still remember, might still be discussing Breathless 50 years after its release would have seemed ridiculous to the 28-year-old Godard. They were making a movie for the moment, not for future generations of critics.
I love Breathless, but I won’t argue for its greatness. That greatness - if it exists - is an accidental greatness, the kind that can’t withstand too much intellectual scrutiny. You either love it right away or it grows on you ... or it doesn’t. It is a gestural movie, three chords and a cloud of dust, something that can’t quite be approached head-on. Godard had no idea what he was doing, he was only finding out what his new toys could do. And while he’d make better movies, there are none I love so much as his first.
And quite a few I don’t care for much at all.
I follow Godard still, although his movies have devolved into stolid exercises of political invective. He has dispensed with characters altogether; his 2000 film On the Origin of the 21st Century works backward through the 1900s, using clips borrowed from mainstream movies, war reportage and porno films to create a harrowing elegy for a bloody century, with soft piano chords cushioning images of brutality, rape, murder, degradation.
The collage method tentatively explored in Breathless is manifested in 21st Century as a tour of the auteur’s consciousness. We see the young hero of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining pedaling his Big Wheel through the corridors of the Overlook hotel in the mountains of Colorado, the chief ruffian from Bunuel’s Los Olvidados, a damaged scrap of a turn-of-the-century stag film and - most surprising - the final shot of Breathless, with Seberg staring beautifully, vacantly, into the camera as she absently draws her thumb across her lips.
That’s where it ends. And where it started.
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Style, Pages 27 on 10/05/2010