Breathless (1960)

À bout de soufflé, France, 90 minutes
Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Writers: Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard
Photography: Raoul Coutard
Music: Martial Solal
Editors: Cecile Decugis, Lila Herman
Cast: Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean Seberg, Daniel Boulanger, Jean-Pierre Melville

I better cop to a problem with Jean-Luc Godard right up front, if only as a matter of fair warning: hidebound conventions (and spoilers) directly ahead. Godard is and remains, for me, an acknowledged blind spot, likely weighed down as much as anything by the imposing reputation that has preceded him practically since the day I first heard of him. His most widely hailed pictures—and Breathless, his feature debut, is the first among them in many ways, along with Pierrot le fou, which affects me similarly, and Contempt, which seems slightly a bit of a different animal, but all that in due time—tend to strike me as monumentally silly or academically pretentious or both, the result of children playacting with motion picture technology.

I will grant these are no ordinary children—they have levels of aesthetic sophistication, and no small degree of high critical argle-bargle, to back themselves up. Godard seems to me to be continually about finding ways to demonstrate he is a million times smarter than anyone else in the (darkened) room, which his followers are as much at pains to defend seemingly on any terms within reach, on grounds of avant-garde experimentalism, defiant anti-convention, unique vision, I-know-you-are-but-what-is-he, the continuing perception of a widespread and penetrating influence, and as many others as can be and are adduced in seminar environments. And all that may be true enough. But they do tend to derive almost purely from the cerebrum. My problem is more acutely with the overall experience his pictures tend to deliver for me, which is narrow and small.


Breathless is a fine example and nearly perfect object lesson in Godard's various problems and strengths. Ostensibly it's a picture about a gangster and/or alienated thug on the lam for shooting a policeman; and he's in love with an American doll, which ultimately leads to his downfall. But it's actually anything but a gangster picture, much less a thriller. It starts with tired old academic notions of existentialism (perhaps not as tired in 1960 as they are now) and dresses itself up in gangster garb—or, more accurately, in Hollywood B-movie drag—even ostentatiously dedicating itself, in the opening, "to Monogram pictures" (home of a recycled Charlie Chan series, the Cisco Kid and many other westerns, and Joe Palooka, and also the place where such players as Alan Ladd, Robert Mitchum, and Gale Storm first found work).

Whereas pictures such as Scarlet Street or Night and the City actually locate meaningful examples of existentialism in the desperate lives of criminals and anonymous denizens of modern cities and then let those forces play out in ways that powerfully make their points about the terms and meanings of being and remaining alive and engaged with life, Breathless offers a couple of pretty faces, one of them, Michel Poiccard (played by Jean-Paul Belmondo), engaging continually in ornate gestures that he self-consciously picked up from the movies, or just invented evidently because it's something fun to do (the spliffy cigarettes, cocked fedoras, and a deliberate gesture of squinting his eyes and tracing his pursed mouth with the edge of his thumb, homage to Humphrey Bogart).

For all my (cerebral) objections, I can't deny there's a good deal of charm embedded all through Breathless. It's light and playful and cool, like its jazzy soundtrack, and it's almost always great to look at. At least two of the hallmarks of filmmaking I most associate with Godard are present and accounted for here and hitting on most cylinders too: the jump cuts, which emphasize the false and constructed nature of film and/or narrative at the same time that they effectively establish a pace to the storytelling that enables Godard to cut away a good bit of the flab associated with most of the Hollywood B-movies he is honoring (it's singularly well edited); and, my single favorite feature of Godard pictures, the mad swirl of language, here shuttling effortlessly, transparently between French and English. Later Godard pictures would accommodate even more languages at once, producing an effect for me that is surprisingly and pleasantly immersive.

I see that I have probably tipped my hand there on something about my own personal orientations with that "immersive." It's what I want from the movies I watch (including documentaries), the novels and histories I read, the music I listen to, indeed from all the art and culture with which I engage—a convincing sense of being swept up and carried away to another place, which may or may not resemble the places I occupy in reality (though I do prefer a connection between my reality and the reality of a narrative, as too much fantasy bores me). I sometimes think that that immersion is the one thing Godard is so often at pains to deny, even as he shows himself capable of it in frustratingly patchy passages all through his career.

I like Breathless best when it is a relationship movie, a story about a boyfriend and girlfriend (Patricia Franchini, played by Jean Seberg) attempting to connect, sorting out their issues, getting close, yet not quite making it. They are like any 20something couple hanging out in a big city, taking off their clothes and spending a lot of time in an apartment having sex and talking and talking, about their aspirations and choices and preferences, playing music for one another, getting out to cultural events— here uniformly represented as "press conferences," including one priceless scene with Jean-Pierre Melville playing a puffed-up iconoclastic figure wearing shades who is reminiscent of Henry Miller. Asked to name his greatest ambition, he says, "To become immortal, and then to die."

I like Breathless least when it is pretending to be a gangster movie, which unfortunately provides the overarching frame of the thing and permeates every last scene of it. It's rife with cultural signifiers in that vein, Humphrey Bogart and loud jazz and incidental shots of movie posters that say things like "Live desperately until the end!" And speaking of living desperately to the end, I will add that somehow the protracted death scene in the street at the end works for me as well, all the way through to the silly mugging at the very end that brings it momentarily back to its charming, even innocent boyfriend/girlfriend theme.

But it also leaves me shaking my head at Godard's usual overly determined frothiness, if not entirely disinclined to want to praise it. Those interested in Godard can probably start here, of course (and/or Contempt and/or Pierrot le fou), and take it from there, with all due caution and expectations set appropriately. And I'll see you there, as I'm pretty sure I'm not yet done with this guy by a long sight.