Film School Weekend: Breathless

"There was before BREATHLESS, and there was after BREATHLESS!" 

Few movies in the French New Wave canon loom quite as large as Jean-Luc Godard's debut (by the way, not to go super parenthetical in the very first paragraph, but the fact that we've already covered two directorial debuts that made such an impact to this particular moment in film history would indicate, I think, just how large a burst of energy the French New Wave really was.  Almost like a whole generation of filmmakers were waiting and waiting and waiting, and then when they finally got the chance, BAM!  Anyway.)

There are reasons for its strong legacy.  BREATHLESS, a sort-of riff on American crime films, hits the ground running right at the start and never really lets up from its pace until the end of its ninety minutes.  As well, it features two characters who are aimless in their own ways, and kind of feed off of each other, something that was a little unusual for its time.

And it had style in so many different ways.  It had literal style; Jean Seberg's shirts (both the striped one and the one reading New York Herald Tribune) have been recreated and are available to purchase on a plethora of websites to this day.  But it also had cinematic style, most famously its unconventional usage of jump cuts, sometimes several in a row within the same scene.

BREATHLESS permeates through pop culture to this day, with references to it being found in diverse sources such as Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Ghost in the Shell.  Naturally, I hadn't seen it, which made it a natural choice this month for Film School Weekend.

So....how does BREATHLESS stand up to its almost overwhelming pedigree?  Does it stand up to it?

Hop in, let's find out.

BREATHLESS (1960)

Directed by: Jean-Luc Godard

Starring: Jean Seberg, Jean-Paul Belmondo

Written by: Godard (story by Francois Truffaut, Claude Chabrol)

Length: 87 minutes

Released: March 16, 1960

BREATHLESS kicks things off with perhaps the greatest opening line in film history ("After all, I'm an asshole") as we meet Belmondo's charming, nihilistic criminal Michel. He's on the run from the law after stealing a car, which leads to him suddenly shooting and killing a police officer. He hightails it back to Paris and hides out with an American girlfriend of his, Patricia. His plan: get her to run away with him to Italy before the law catches up with him. Eventually, an inspector will make Patricia have to make a choice about her mysterious, free-wheeling man who, by the way, she may now be carrying the baby of.

What's really interesting about BREATHLESS is that the above all makes the film sound fairly plot-heavy, and not altogether separate from an American crime film or noir from the 30's or 40's, perhaps the kind of Humphrey Bogart-starring vehicle that Michel himself would have enjoyed. But this movie really isn't about the plot, nor does it feel American. Instead, it makes its mark in the character scenes, these long, more steadily-shot sequences where Michel and Patricia are talking about anything and everything.

Godard really wants to draw out the fundamental differences between Patricia, who is at a crossroads in her life and desperately searching for meaning and purpose, and Michel, who has long ago found his meaning and purpose: the lack and absence of meaning and purpose altogether. He likes watching movies like THE HARDER THEY FALL and then stealing cars and acting like a general piece of shit ("after all, I'm an asshole").

For a wide a gulf as this difference in philosophy is, you sort of get the appeal on Patricia's end. Admittedly, for someone who's looking for something, the option and permission to stop looking entirely must feel quite alluring. And for Michel, being with someone who is looking for something more must be so foreign as to be completely captivating. The chance to exist in each other's head spaces appears to be fulfilling some sort of psychological need for the both of them.

This brings us back to those infamous jump cuts. There are a surprising amount of theories as to their express purpose, some even suggesting the jump cuts were placed in random spots by Godard, either in an act of spite or desperation. Other explanations offered get deep into editing theory, which is way beyond my education and knowledge base. In my estimation and observation, these cuts seem to occur mostly in scenes where Michel is in transit, either with himself or with Patricia in tow. We're in Michel's territory, his mind-set, and we now have to move a million miles an hour, even when we're sitting in the back of the car. Notice, though, how much the movie seems to settle down when we're in Patricia's apartment. Now we're in her territory and, thus, in a less kinetic, fast-paced space. Whether it was the true intent or not, it felt to me like an indicator as to whose eyes we were supposed to be experiencing a certain scene through.

As you might expect with a sixty-year old movie that was so well known for its frenetic editing and pace, BREATHLESS suffers a little bit now that we have entire generations that have been born and raised after the advent of MTV.  A movie that probably seemed incredibly fast, especially when compared to the more modest editing practices of many films up to that point, now seems like nothing compared to the average movie you could find buried in an Amazon Prime category. 

That said, I'd argue that, when BREATHLESS is really up and running, some of its jump cuts create a pace that still reads as unusually fast, even in this age of ADD.  I'm not kidding when I say there are some scenes of Michel and Patricia driving in a car where it feels like there's a cut every second for several seconds in a row.  Just as an example, there's the really famous sequence where Michel, driving Patricia to an appointment, starts listing off parts of the female body he adores, each accompanied by a new jump cut of Patricia sitting in the passenger seat.  They're not even shots of particular body parts, just a fresh look at her for every sentence fragment.  This is a pace that is usually reserved now for bad modern action sequences, not something so relatively stationary. 

This feels like a good time to mention that I stand as a little mixed on BREATHLESS as a whole. Despite how interesting it was to watch, I found it a little difficult to settle into in the way that some of my favorite movies do (side note: something I've noticed when watching a fundamental classic for the first time is that I often experience...not an out-of-body experience, exactly. But almost like I'm watching myself watch it? Like my thought process is more, "here I am, watching RAGING BULL". Almost as if the movie looms so large that I can't focus right away. Does anybody else experience this phenomenon?). With a few days to reflect, I have to wonder if it's because its true innovation was technical rather than thematic. I can usually tell when a movie resonates with me when the analysis flows through me even days after seeing it. This time, I had to look up certain things to jog my memory. C'est la vie.

However, there's still a major take-away that made it worth my, and your, time.  Once again, what I want to draw attention to is a performance within BREATHLESS, this time one given to us by Jean Seberg.  In a way, she has the harder role between her and Belmondo.  Belmondo gets to be extroverted, forceful, the cool Humphrey Bogart wannabe.  By comparison, Patricia is often more passive, at least externally.  But she is the one where the change occurs in the story, at least it seemed to me.  She is the one who has to evaluate the unique, aimless worldview of her criminal lover and ultimately decide to reject it by turning him in, even as she doubts herself all the way to the ambiguous closing moments.

Because Patricia does at least have goals and ambitions, her being an aspiring journalist and all.  Michel is happy just to be an asshole, living his life like a Bogart film without much care and regard to who gets hurt along the way.  Yet she loves him anyway, maybe too tempted by his disregard.  

Seberg is able to register all of these complex emotions without doing much at all.  I've already gushed last week how much I latch on to those who act without acting, whose entire inner life is so clear and consistent that the performer can just sit there and you follow along completely.  Well, Seberg delivers on that front.  She's someone who lived a short, complicated, fascinating life (fun fact: she was a particular target by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI for her support of the Black Panthers), and I highly recommend Karina Longworth's series about it as part of her bigger You Must Remember This podcast if you're interested in hearing more.

Overall, despite how interesting BREATHLESS was to watch and write about, I was surprised how much of it has faded away from me a few days later.  Maybe it's that lack of focus on story that caused me to walk away with less than it felt (this is something I'm still adjusting to in other genres, such as giallo).  Or maybe it's the fact that it's hard to shake the feeling that it's mostly an exercise in style.  Divorced from its moment in time, its legacy might be more what it would go on to inspire more than it actually is.

Jean Seberg, though, man.