The Greats: Breathless

The Greats: “Breathless”

France. 1960. Directed by Jean-Luc Godard. Screenplay by Jean-Luc Godard. Story by François Truffaut. Starring: Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean Seberg, Daniel Boulanger, Jean-Pierre Melville, Henri-Jacques Huet and Van Doude.

Handheld camerawork, long takes, jump cuts, iris in and out shots. These techniques are familiar today but they startled and exhilarated audiences at the time of Jean-Luc Godard’s monumentally influential “Breathless.” And watching a film as this now is like joyfully retracing and rediscovering the ancestry of the beloved ingenuities in modern cinema.

Godard was, of course, famously one of the French New Wave directors alongside François Truffaut, Louis Malle and Jean-Pierre Melville (the latter of whom has a small starring role in this film). Godard is perhaps the most studied of all of them, no less because he said such famous quotes as, “Instead of writing criticism, I now film it” and “Every edit is a lie.”

Both of these concepts are present in this film. The first is in the way its antihero, Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo) models himself after Humphrey Bogart films. His character is a paradox: a man completely lacking in morals as a thief and murderer (he is seen killing a cop in the very beginning) but utterly clueless and naive about how to act tough and cool to mask his amorality.

The second is even more subtle. It is in the way he uses long takes and jump cuts to have us visually focus on the isolated interplay between Michel and Patricia (Jean Seberg), the American girl he tries to court. All of their dalliances are shot in continuous long takes with a few jump cuts in between. In contrast, the other side characters’ monologues are seen frequently in staccato jump-cuts (which were shot in long takes with frames removed at random to create the mismatch between dialogue and camera shots).

The film's more curious and intriguing character is not Michel, however, but Patricia. Michel is really all surface and mannerisms, as he tries to live a no-holds-barred existence to steal as much as he can and bed various women. Patricia, on the other hand, is a woman who hasn’t found her place in society yet, always keeps somewhat of a poker face and is often silently trying to organize her thoughts. Because she and the movie never spell it out, we wonder what attracts her to him. Is she truly charmed by him or simply exhilarated to be so close to a cheerful crook like him?

Their flirtations continue as the cops are on his trail (seen often in iris in and out shots at the end of a scene). He starts to feel that he may love her. There is one crucial moment during their long dalliance when he says, “I love you but not in the way you think” and she replies, “How do you know what I think?” Her answer to this question of her feelings could be his saving grace or his ultimate downfall.

Much like the other cinematically referential French New Wave pictures, this is a film that loves movies. At one point, the two sneak into the Bogart picture, “The Harder They Fall” to escape the police. They frequently reference other Bogart movies as “High Sierra” as well as some French New Wave pictures. All of this represent a time in France when people were in love with the cultural headline that was the cinema.

And no wonder, as the film was a true revolutionary compared to the more conventional narratives of the stately French movies of yesteryear, which was much criticized by the pioneers of the French New Wave movement. Godard, like the other French New Wave directors, was formerly one of the critics of the famous French magazine, “Cahier du Cinema" who went on to respectively visualize their cinematic opinions. He adapted the innovative style of black-and-white Hollywood crime films that he embraced and deconstructed it through the spectrum of realism (the long takes adding to it and the jump cuts subtracting from it). The rest is, needless to say, in the annals of film history.

All the famous cinematic fugitives from films like “Bonnie and Clyde” and “Badlands” owe something to “Breathless,” as do much of modern cinema. The most important idea it contributed is its object lesson. Abandoning the glamour of the 30s Hollywood crime movies, the wave of realistic crime pictures highlight that under the intoxicating nature of crime lies a great confusion that is ultimately sad and self-defeating.