Breathless (À bout de souffle) was Jean-Luc Godard’s first feature film, which he directed in 1960. The film follows a romance between Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a small-time crook on the run from the law, and Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg) a young American woman selling papers on the boulevards of Paris. While the film has a tragic ending, is it also truly romantic. Michel models himself on Humphrey Bogart, but after he accidentally shoots a cop reality comes crashing down. Turning to his gamine girlfriend, Patricia, he convinces her to hide him in her apartment, while also trying to borrow money off her to fund an escape overseas. But the course of true love never did run smooth – and in this case, the truthfulness of the love and the lovers is unclear. The characters each have their own secrets and motivations.
Often cited in discussions of French New Wave cinema, the film has an interesting style and was significant at the time for its innovative use of jump cuts (where two sequential shots of the same subject are shown, with angles that vary only very slightly). With a bit of research I discovered that the film also uses improvised dialogue, another trademark of French New Wave cinema. Godard was himself a film critic, and in Breathless you can see the influence of the films he would’ve watched at the time. Breathless is, in many ways, homage to American gangster films – though Godard imbued the genre with his own style and subtlety. It is not merely an American socio-psycho thriller, but a pastiche of genres, and a melding of high and low culture. Godard includes visuals of Picasso’s paintings of women next to pin-ups; includes a soundtrack that plays pop music after classical.
Where outsiders and outcasts in modern alternative cinema often find their home in films that are ponderous and slow-paced, the outcasts here in Breathless live big, brash and loud lives. It is set in the 1960s, after all, an era that’s subcultures embraced the cutting edge. And indeed, the fun that the characters have seems to be mirrored in the fun that you feel Godard would have made making the film. He takes the film convention handbook and tears it up
As much as it would be possible to analyze Breathless until you are, well breathless – the film has a heart. Beyond the referentiality, beyond the innovative style of filmmaking, and beyond the film’s place as a precursor to the New Wave – Breathless is first and foremost a film about love. It captures perfectly the feeling of being young and in love, featuring characters who feel unbeatable but who are often fallible.
How much this film made me want to live in Paris: 4 stars out of 5, for the 60s style and Paris streets.
How highly I would recommend the film: 3 ½ stars out of 5.
