Godard’s Breathtaking Debut is Back Again
Breathless
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
It
took 60 years to correct the English title of Proust’s masterwork from
Remembrance of Things Past to In Search of Lost Time and
now the 50th anniversary of Jean-Luc Godard’s equally
legendary
Breathless deserves the same emendation (playing May 28-June 10 at Film Forum). Critics routinely
translated
the title A bout de souffle
to mean "Out of Breath," but a few years ago I was standing
new French tourists who noticed a flashy American automobile and cried
"A bout de souffle!" I immediately reflected on Godard’s
colloquial intent: His debut film—an homage to Hollywood genre—was
titled like the exclamations in studio-era trailers: BREATHTAKING! And
50 years after its debut, that’s still Breathless’
effect: a breathtaking reboot of American genre tropes.
In
a 1970s reassessment of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1959 debut feature, critic
William
S. Pechter proclaimed "Breathless
exists! Breathless exists so that the Siegfried Kracauers of
the world can hold their breath. Breathless
exists!" Pechter was celebrating a movie that employed cinematic
theory as a practical, elating fact. All imaginable advances that came
into popula culture following the appearance of Breathless—when
commercial cinema and television imitated and trivialized the formal
inventions of ’60s European art cinema (such as Godard’s casually
innovative use of the jump cut)—are facts that we now take for granted.
A
certain kind of nonchalance has come from living with Breathless
almost 50 years, and watching it in poor prints, faint VHS copies,
squished TV broadcasts. The excitement of discovery is almost gone,
meaning it’s time for rediscovery. First-time viewers might yet find
Godard’s rigorous technique a challenge—perhaps even intimidating given
how the once-novel jump cut, the hand-held camera, on-location shooting
and use of natural-lighting have become routine and meaningless parts
of visual media co vocabulary. But what never ceased to be compelling
about Breathless is he tragic love story b between Parisian bum
Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and American adventuress Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg). Their mismatch might be the most revolutionary
aspect of Breathless, revealing that Godard’s technical experimentation
was integral to modernizing a timeless romantic archetype.
The
clash of European tradition and American newness are organic to Michel
and Patricia’s chemistry. Their sexual allure (and Belmondo and Seberg
remain one of the most delectable male-female pairings in movie history)
gives a sparkling patina to the cultural-political circumstance of
Franco-American
relations. Breathless scholars have frequently commented on the
notoriously censored edit where Michel skirt-chasing Patricia is matched
to a shot of a DeGaulle parade—implying French politicians scampering
after American policy—but this merely touches upon an obvious
political
irreverence. It is the femme-fatale- plot of Breathless
that provides a more powerfully personal sense of European infatuation
with Yankee style and supremacy.
In
this classic broken-hearted love story, Michel represents the culture
that American power recently liberated being cruelly paid back by the
next ahistorical generation. Thus, it expresses both romantic
yearning
and political severity—timeless human circumstances. Neither Michel
nor Patricia are political animals, but they are barometers of
attitudes—the
real-life politics of daily habits (his restless sexuality, her
seemingly
complacent sense of power); survival (his petty thievery, her careerism)
and opportunism (his stumbling upon death in the mechanical murder of
a motorcycle cop, re resigned attitude toward betrayal and spiritual
death).
Though
rarely discussed as either a love story or a political film, Breathless
maintains fascination because it is equally both. Godard’s
political-romantic
ambivalence—toward women, toward America (Hollywood)—locates a crucial
and basic complexity about what has been called the American century.
That doubled feeling, the Michel-Patricia love-hate paradox, has been
the subject of several, even epochal films—from Vincente Minnelli’s
1951 An American in Paris to Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1972 Last
Tango in Paris. Those signposts contain the reverse of Godard’s
story; the protagonists’ positions are altered to American male
supplicant
and French female idol.
Through
this switch of Minnelli’s prototype, Godard responded to Hollywood
narrative–speaking
back to American mythology. Michel’s Bogart-fancy reveals a debt to
America that Patricia cruelly collects; as drama it is a psychosexual
expression of the European left’s view of American imperialism. By the
time Bertolucci responded to Godard’s modernist vision of cultural and
political relations, the male-female antagonism was switched back to
the Minnelli model, yet is suffused with a European sense of regret
(Brando’s American supplicant doesn’t reference Bogart but the tragic
figures of French poetic realism like Jean Gabin in Port of Shadows
and Italian neorealist like Massimo Girotti in Ossessione).
To
look at Breathless as an extension of the film noir and gangster movie,
based primarily on Godard’s stated dedication of it to B-movie studio
Monogram Pictures places too much of a limit on all that the film
evokes.
Its politics run deeper than just a crime story; despite the plot’s
cop-chase framework, the story moves into more personal-political realm.
Godard deepens and elevates his protagonists into figures with the rich
psychological compulsions of A-level melodramas like those of Minnelli,
Nicholas Ray and Otto Preminger. (The Preminger connection is made
undeniable
by Godard’s implication of Preminger’s discovery Jean Seberg.)
As
the United States’ global image currently endures a new era of
anti-American
sentiment, Patricia’s alarming blank expression of innocence at the
end of Breathless ("‘Deguelasse’? I don’t know what it means!")
seems more resonant than ever. It is more than simply critical of
American
sexual, romantic, military, political and economic might; the final
image of Patricia also admits enthrallment with that very same
irresistible
monster. After all, Godard’s choice of a career in filmmaking (perhaps
the most bourgeois of all artistic pursuits) has to entail a certain
degree of guilt for a politically conscious intellectual.
In
this sense Michel and Patricia’s love story represents innocence in
the face of guilt. That’s what propels Breathless in the imaginative
life of every new generation of college-student film loves. Although
the cinematic canon has shifted in recent years away from
Hollywood-based
and Eurocentric cataloging, there has been no new film that expresses
political and cultural ambivalence as ingeniously as Breathless does.
The
legend of Godard’s Breathless
as the most radical expression of the French New Wave, catapulting the
Nouvelle Vague into the vanguard of both cinematic experimentation and
popular appeal is revived with its re-release. For all that the film
can now be seen to contain (a love story, a political allegory, a
cultural-diplomatic
examination, a revolution in film esthetics), its significance is more
vibrant than ever. Godard turned theory into practice and romance into
politics so successfully that Breathless’ central position in film
culture
and its popularity among serious film-watchers has never receded. Movie
history and cultural politics vibrate throughout Breathless.
It exists indeed. Indeed, it is breathtaking.
