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Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo get obsessed with their own images in À Bout de Souffle |
Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Cast: Jean-Paul Belmondo (Michael Poiccard), Jean Seberg
(Patricia Franchini), Daniel Boulanger (Police Inspector Vital), Henri-Jacques
Huet (Antonio Berruti), Roger Hanin (Carl Zumbach), Jean-Pierre Melville (Parvulesco),
Liliane David (Lilane)
The French New Wave emerged from a group of film critics
from influential magazine Cahiers du
cinema in the 1960s, led by Francois Truffaut (who contributed a four page
story outline to this film, although Godard later minimised his contribution as
much as possible). The movement believed the director was the “author” of the
film, stamping their personality on it. Packed with references to classic Hollywood
movies, the films were shot with an improvisational lack of formality (that
often hid brilliant cinematic technique) inspired by Italian neo-realism.
Breathless,
Jean-luc Godard’s revolutionary masterpiece, was one of the central films in
this school of filmmaking. It followed the last few days of Michael Poiccard
(Jean-Paul Belmondo). A young man drifting through a life of petty crime, who
idealises Humphrey Bogart’s style, he one day steals a car; it happens to have
a gun in it, and in a moment of casual indifference he shoots a policeman
trying to arrest him and flees. In Paris, while being hunted by the police, he
reunites with his girlfriend, American student Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg),
and their self-absorbed relationship plays out under the shadow of the police
net getting tighter and tighter.
Jean-Luc Godard’s film was hugely influential, as it seemed
to re-write the rules of how films were to be made. Godard’s film is down and
dirty, it’s almost guerrilla, but filmed with a wonderful, improvisational
beauty. Shots are hand-held and dynamic, the action is all filmed on location,
the framing is rough and ready, the camera gets up close and personal with the
actors, throwing us in with them with an overwhelming sense of realism. The
whole film feels irreverent, casual and cool, and gets a wonderful sense of urban Paris. It magnifies and reflects the
very qualities the lead characters believe they have themselves.
Godard’s most influential touch was the use of jump cuts
within scenes, with action jumping from moment to moment within a scene
seemingly spontaneously, giving an impression of constant movement and ripping out
the sense of time between actions. It also gives a sense of the film always
driving forward, bouncing from beat to beat. According to rumour, this
influential use of editing was a happy accident. The original cut of the film
was well over two hours, and the distributors wanted something less than 90
minutes. Rather than cut whole scenes, Godard cut the small moments of movement
or peace in scenes, giving the film a jagged freshness.
The whole film is full of these moments, the jumps over
silences and conversational gaps, jumps in time lags between walking from point
A to point B. It really works as well. The exterior scenes buzz with an
exciting freshness. The long second act, basically nothing more than a
conversation in a bedroom between the two leads, is edited almost like an
action scene in a modern film – perfect for the self-dramatising energy the two
characters are leading their lives with.
It’s those two leads who really help to make the film.
Seberg picked up a quarter of the film’s budget to be the “name” lead, and she
brings the film a soulful but distant sense of coolness. Belmondo was the real
find, turning himself overnight into a mega star. In the sixties these were the
people that your cool student wanted
to be. Belmondo nailed his sense of iconoclastic cool in the opening moments –
particularly when turning casually to the camera while driving his stolen car,
to involve us personally in the story of his own life that he is constructing.
You can see how the performances (and characters) of the two
leads had such impact on filmmaking. Energetic but also listless, contemptuous
of authority and certain that whatever the world has in store for them it is
definitely something more,
self-absorbed and selfish, immature and convinced that their lives are more
important that the average people around them – they are the predecessors of Bonnie and Clyde, of the young killers
in Badlands. And nothing seemed to
capture the counter-culture cool than Belmondo with a cigarette dangling from
this mouth, apeing Bogart.
But both lovers are equally selfish and obsessed with their
own stories. Or rather, self-consciously living their lives like they are in a
narrative – in fact you could say that the film predicts the self-obsession of
the social media age. Michael lives a life that is all an entirely constructed
front. He’s a would-be gangster, with a carefully studied front of gritty cool.
He spends endless time making sure that his look, his clothes, his postures,
his manners are always spot-on. He constantly keeps up a stream of consciousness
narrative about his own life and situation, positioning himself as the sort of
representative of modern American hip.
And Patricia is the same. Although at first she seems the
more natural and grounded of the two, it’s clear her self-obsession is just as
profound (if not more so) than Michael’s. Patricia constantly reviews and
rebuilds the narrative of her own life, discussing her romantic life like it
was a carefully constructed fiction, or some sort of hyper-cool Mills and Boon.
“Do I love you? Should I love you? Can I make myself not love you?” Patricia’s
construction of her own narrative – and her desire to shape and control it
completely – makes her as completely artificial as Michael is.
She’s so determined to construct her own narrative, that she
shrugs off a string of revelations about Michael as if they didn’t exist. He’s
a killer? Okay. He’s got at least two names? Hardly matters. He’s married?
Nobody’s perfect. When deciding to betray Michael to the authorities, the
action seems almost motiveless, but it quickly becomes clear that it is led by
her latest review of the life situation and deciding it’s not what she wanted. Surrendering
Michael to the law is her chance to say “No, I shape the story here – and I get
to control who I feel love for, no one else”. By betraying Michael she is
cutting a part of a life narrative out like she was removing a tattoo,
something that she is not sure she wants any more but finds hard to remove.
One area where I do struggle with the film now is the
attitude it has to its heroes. I think it wants us to kind of admire Michael –
for all his faults – as some sort of unconventional hero looking to lead his
life. I struggle to feel the engagement with a guy who is literally a murderer
as much as the film wants me to – but I think this is the result of a major
change from the more rebellious 1960s, to our changed times today. But then I’m
also not sure that the film has as much heart as it wants to have – its
characters are so consciously artificial that you never really get a sense of
them as human beings. They are always characters, never people – and the film
is always focused on their constructed images rather than anything real for you
to invest in. There is much to admire, and not much to love.
And that doesn’t change the influential nature of the film.
While it’s easier to admire the film than to love it – for all the strength of
the performances, the characters are selfish fantasists – and its technical
achievements sometimes distance as much as they throw us into the action, it’s
still brilliantly put together. It’s masterfully made, and while I’m not sure
it really has any heart, it’s got enough energy, force and urgency to make
dozens of films.
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