When we talked, I talked about me, you talked about you, when we should have talked about each other.
Has there ever been a more damning indictment of romantic French cinema than Michel’s line here in Breathless? When I think about pretentious French movies, it’s exactly that: a man and a woman in black and white, both monologuing into the void about whatever the fuck instead of having anything that could possibly resemble human connection. So I guess it took a film critic making his first movie to put that shit on blast. It’s stuff like that that makes Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless still an exciting movie to watch 66 years after its release.
Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is a bad hombre who begins this story by stealing a car in Marseille and killing a cop on the way to Paris. When he gets into town he tries to lie low, but can’t resist pursuing his paramour, Patricia (Jean Seberg), an American journalist who has a day job selling the New York Herald Tribune on the street. The rest of Breathless is ostensibly about the two of them looking for work and money while lying low from the police, but really it’s mostly the couple hanging out in various rooms, revealing their hopes and dreams to each other.
A cocky bastard, Michel styles himself after Humphrey Bogart (which the movie makes explicit by having him stare at a poster of Bogey) and wants to skip town for somewhere like Italy – but he’s obsessed with Patricia and won’t leave without her. He’s full of himself, which makes him a little reckless and a lot entitled. I found him most amusing any time he’s in a car, where his talkative behavior has him constantly berating every other driver on the road. Godard had a preoccupation with traffic, huh?
Patricia is Michel’s opposite. Instead of his confidence, she spends the movie questioning everything – what does she want from him? From love? From life? She’s uncertain about everything, which is a real drag on Michel who just kinda wants to get laid and get going. But it doesn’t help that he can’t really engage at all with the big questions Patricia is admirably trying to deal with. Freud would say she’s the Superego to Michel’s Id, which I guess leaves us as the Ego trying to balance the two out.
Jean-Luc Godard based Breathless on a treatment by François Truffaut, joining his The 400 Blows in the beginning of the French New Wave. Unbelievably, it was loosely based on a true story Truffaut read about a man called Michel Portail, who stole a car to visit his suck mother and killed a motorcycle cop and had an American journalist girlfriend named Beverly Lynette. Godard had a tiny budget to work with, which influenced everything about how the film was made: they shot it documentary-style, with a hand-held camera and natural lighting. Although filming locations were decided on in advance, Godard would write the dialogue on the day and encourage the actors to improvise and they would only shoot while he felt “inspired.” Perhaps most inspired is the film’s editing, which uses so many jump cuts you’d expect to see Liam Neeson climbing a fence at any moment.
So Breathless is fun and a little bit sexy and certainly inspiring in its production. But I think I came to it too late in my French New Wave journey to be overly excited about this one. Right now, I’d direct newcomers towards Left Bank films like Hiroshima mon amour or Cléo from 5 to 7 or even The Umbrellas of Cherbourg first. Or, since Jean-Pierre Melville is in Breathless, maybe go see Le Samouraï, Le Cercle Rouge? I guess my point is, the films considered some of the best ever are… good.