“After all, I’m an asshole.”
A sentence that signals a
revolution: for those who believe the spirit of the sixties isn’t conjured
until Jack Kennedy is shot in Dallas, Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (or Out
of Breath) puts a rakish, brazenly insolent French petty hoodlum on a crime
spree that in a breezy ninety minutes overthrows every stuffy rule holding back
the new cinema: to paraphrase a contemporary critic: “where pretentious youth
overthrow an even more pretentious establishment.”
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We know nothing about this young
thug – Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo, who at twenty-seven has made
virtually no impression in his first nine pictures) – apart from his cheeky
grin, the cigarette dangling from his lower lip and his ability to hot wire
American cars. In a brisk ten minutes Michel steals a car, kills a cop and
propositions his girl (or is she?) on the Champs-Elysees. That girl – Patricia Franchini
(the corn bred All-American Jean Seberg, fresh off two critically lambasted
films for her cinema daddy Otto Preminger) is wearing a flesh tight T-shirt
with the logo of her employer “New York Herald Tribune” girdling her chest –
Michel rudely quips, “Why don’t you wear a bra?”
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Famous for breaking all the rules
of filmmaking at that precious moment: August/September 1959 – with his furious
jump cuts and handheld camera – Godard actually took more calculated risks with
extremely long takes and for a crime flick an audacious mid film chapter where
Belmond and Seberg hop in and out of bed philosophizing about the future of
their relationship: whether she would jump into his latest stolen car and flee
to Italy or whether she’d rather sleep her way up the ranks of Paris freelance
journalism. A droll episode has Patricia tossing brilliantly pretentious
questions at a heavyweight male novelist who flirts back employing every hoary
cliché of the language of love.
Fifty years later the attitudes may
seem absurdly precious but the images endure: Belmondo staring up at a cinema
poster of Bogey in his last feature (The Harder They Fall) rubbing his
thumb across his lips in a symbolic kiss to the freshly dead icon whose image
he would appropriate for the next couple of decades; Belmondo and Seberg
smoking up a storm – at one point she literally disappears into a cloud of
cigarette smoke – as they flirt with a future she’s already preparing to
betray.
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With its beautifully restored
images reminding us what it was like to be alive at the dawn of the French New
Wave, Breathless is a rush, both an unimaginably romantic peek at hetero
love on the run and a fantastic document of life in the early days of the Fifth
Republic – at one point Godard’s camera flirts along the edge of a huge Parisian
parade in honor of the American and French presidents – then he madly follows
our couple on the lam as they flee the cops: one funny moment has Seberg
escaping a police tail by ducking into a cinema ladies room stall.
As always the debate continues
about Michel’s famous dying words: does he call her a “bitch,” a “scumbag” or
is this merely one final gratuitous curse by a prankish boy at his cruel if
preordained fate. Breathless is a lovely reminder of a more innocent
time when the term pretentious youth could still be a badge of honor.