“After all, I am an asshole.”
Is there a more apropos opening line in the history of cinema than this salvo from Jean-Luc Godard’s genre-busting debut film, Breathless? We hear Jean-Paul Belmondo’s disembodied declaration before we see him. His Michel Poiccard is the epitome of the male id run amok. A lowlife criminal, Michel lives in an imagined noir film ‒ sleeping with floozies and stealing cars while keeping a running commentary about the things he enjoys and those that disgust him. In an era before social media, Michel presages the hyper-narcissistic age we embody where everyone with a phone and an Instagram account can create and curate whatever type of existence they choose.
But this imagined existence soon gives way to a very real one in the opening moments of Breathless. Michel and a female accomplice steal a tourist’s car and soon Michel is on the way from Marseille to Paris, leaving his friend behind. Along the way, Michel will complain about women drivers and bust the fourth wall, addressing the camera directly to enumerate the type of people who infuriate him. But then Michel murders a cop and finds himself on the lam. That perceived noir life comes to fruition. All Michel needs is to find a femme fatale to do him in.
Released in 1960 ‒ the French New Wave well-established ‒ Breathless might be the most nouvelle vague film of them all in its paradoxical nature. Like its protagonist, both Godard and the film itself establish themselves here as enfant terribles of the movement. Breathless ‒ with its unrepentant anti-authoritarian streak, unapologetically piggish characters and its daring to break down the conventions that made moviemaking stale and safe in the ‘50s – pushes further and breaks more conventions than its contemporaries.
Michel meets his match in Patricia (Jean Seberg), a young American who has come to Paris to study at the Sorbonne but who makes money on the side working for a newspaper. She has slept with Michel once or twice but isn’t interested in dashing off with him to Rome, where he hopes to elude the ever-encroaching police who have identified him as the cop-murderer. Michel finds Patricia’s reluctance to succumb to his charms frustrating, but the challenge ensnares him. He is incredulous that anyone would turn him down and thus he fixates on Patricia.
Although it is difficult to like Michel, Belmondo’s performance makes the case for anyone who questions spending 90 minutes with such a reprobate. At one point, Michel and Patricia are in a cab, discussing the skirts that Parisian women have been wearing. Michel says the skirts make him want to flip them up when he sees them and then urges the cabbie to stop. He then rushes out to a woman strolling on the sidewalk, flips her skirt and then retreats to the cab.
It’s this ugly side of the male persona that embodies Michel. He pouts, he glowers, he insults. He uses his fists and gets frustrated when something prevents him from getting money or sex. In an incredible, extended sequence, Michel and Patricia hang out in her apartment. While Patricia wants to engage in conversation, Michel uses every trick in the book to convince her to sleep with him. He is a complete pig, but Patricia eventually submits. Is this the type of a man that a woman wants or is it simply wistful thinking on Godard’s part?
Breathless is based on a treatment by Francois Truffaut whose The 400 Blows, along with Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima, Mon Amour, helped advance new ways to experience movies. Breathless is famous for its jump cuts, along with numerous other innovations which make the film about the joy of filmmaking. In some ways, Godard’s camera and Belmondo’s Michel are similar whether they are shadowboxing or pugnaciously trying to win us over with blunt entreaties. Neither is afraid to take a risk. Both seek authenticity. “Live dangerously until the end” blares an ad early in the film. Neither Michel nor Godard is disputing such an imperative.
The joy of cinema bleeds into the film, threatening to disrupt the fabric of its reality. A young girl tries to sell Michel a copy of Cahiers du Cinéma, the magazine founded by André Bazin that gave Godard and many of the New Wave directors a start as critics. Director Jean-Pierre Melville, a major influence on the New Wave, appears in a cameo as a writer at a press conference Patricia attends. Michel even uses the name László Kovács as an alias, but any relationship to the cinematographer who would find fame during the American New Wave of the ‘70s seems completely unintentional.
That opening line is the only time Michel shows any self-recrimination. But is acknowledging that he is an asshole really a mea culpa or a shrug? As he lies dying in the street at the end of the movie, Michel tells Patricia that she makes him want to puke. Unrepentant to the end, Michel never apologizes. Neither did Godard. And neither does Breathless.
The post Revisit: Breathless appeared first on Spectrum Culture.