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Breathless (À bout de souffle) [DVD]

Director : Jean-Luc Godard

Screenplay : Jean-Luc Godard (story by François Truffaut)

MPAA Rating : NR

Year of Release : 1960

Stars : Jean-Paul Belmondo (Michel Poiccard), Jean Seberg (Patricia Franchini), Daniel Boulanger (Police Inspector Vital), Jean-Pierre Melville (Parvulesco), Henri-Jacques Huet (Antonio Berrutti), Van Doude (Himself), Claude Mansard (Claudius Mansard), Jean-Luc Godard (An Informer), Richard Balducci (Tolmatchoff), Roger Hanin (Cal Zombach), Jean-Louis Richard (A Journalist)

The French New Wave was already well underway when Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (À bout de souffle) debuted in 1960, but it was this rough-edged, black-and-white homage to B-gangster films that sent the nouvelle vague into the stratosphere. Alain Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour and François Truffaut's The 400 Blows (Les Quatre cents coups) had both been released a year earlier, and both (especially Truffaut's film) had been critically and commercially successful. However, it was Breathless that was immediately recognized as a truly revolutionary film with its jangly jump-cut aesthetic, glamorous yet down-to-earth outlaw stars, and Paris-in-the-raw camerawork. It lacked the polish of Truffaut's film and the heady, intellectual romanticism of Resnais's. It was a deliberately unpolished gem, all the more beautiful for its refusal to play by the rules.

Godard himself described the film as “the sort of film where anything goes: that was what it was all about.” He was self-consciously trying to reinvent the idea of what a mainstream movie could do, drawing on both avant-garde traditions and American genre films. In its simplest form, Breathless is a crime melodrama featuring a callously amoral youth named Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo) who is on the run from the cops after gunning down a highway patrolman. He flees to Paris, where he hooks up with Patricia (Jean Seberg), a former girlfriend who is as ambivalent as he is insensible. The majority of the film focuses on their interactions as they talk, draw together, and pull apart, casually enmeshed in their own personal world while the hurly-burly of modern Paris raves outside their window and the cops close in.

The story, which was originally penned by Truffaut, is the film's crucial foundation, but it is hardly its chief draw. The revolution in Breathless is its heady use of then-jarring cinematic style to reflect the lives and attitudes of its youthful protagonists. Godard borrows the neorealist aesthetics of handheld cameras, natural light, and location shooting and then injects them with a rush of disconnected jump cuts and narrative leaps, giving the film a giddy, rushing, utterly unexpected quality that reflects the abstracted rush of modern life just as surely as it attacks the stodginess of French cinema in the 1950s. Godard and the other French New Wave filmmakers wanted to explode cinematic conventions and reinvent the medium on their own terms. Most of them had worked as critics for the influential film journal Cahiers du cinéma, lavishing praise on American filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, and Nicholas Ray while dismissing the so-called French “cinema of quality.”

Breathless was the film that, moreso than any other before it, exploded conventions and suggested what an alternate French cinema might look like. It was a perfect storm of a movie, with all the right pieces falling into place. Behind the camera, Godard found just the right mix of the expected and the unexpected. He dedicated the film to Monogram Pictures, a poverty-row U.S. production company, as a way of aligning Breathless with the kind of dirt-cheap productions that can't rely on star power and special effects to generate their energy. Thus, the film opens with its first bit of self-reflexivity, which reaches its apex when Michel stands in front of a poster of Humphrey Bogart and self-consciously mimics Bogie's manner of running his thumb across his lips, which is perhaps the most famous scene in all of 1960s French cinema. In a single instance Godard addresses a myriad of issues, from the youth culture's embrace and emulation of media icons, to the increasing loss of conventional morality, to the French guilty-pleasure love of cheap American culture. In the process, 26-year-old Belmondo became an international star, a new icon of lanky sensuality.

Godard, on the other hand, became a phenomenon. Moreso than any of the other French New Waco filmmakers, he became larger than life, producing a series of films throughout the 1960s that became more and more radical and more and more political, arguably culminating with his counter-cinema masterpiece Weekend (1967). However, it was Breathless that not only put Godard on the cinematic map, but cut the most gaping hole in the conventions of mainstream cinema, through which poured new possibilities whose influences are still felt to the core of everything from Quentin Tarantino's self-effacing talky crime capers to rapid-fire music videos.

Copyright ©2007 James Kendrick

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All images copyright © The Criterion Collection