Breathless (1960)

People often ask me (actually they don't) how I manage to be so eclectic in my tastes--I like everything. Or, at least, a little of everything.

I just don't see anything, any one type of media, as being more important or inherently less interesting than the other. Or maybe it's because I like having all types of mental or intellectual experiences. Or, perhaps, because this mad dream of "reality" is so multi-varied I feel that not getting a glimpse of each of its strange, inexplicable facets is less than what a human being should aspire to. Am I making sense? No? Good.

At any rate, I've spent a while now writing about "bad" movies (a subjective categorization, typically), as well as television shows and other forms of mental junk food. This dovetails nicely with my other plebeian interests and tastes, but is not exactly the "class act." Oh well. We all die in the end.

But I do have a side of me that appreciates excellence, high art, and cinematic brilliance--as exemplified by a film such as Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, a delve into the cinema-verite lives of beautiful, desperate Parisians (and an American) who are too chichi and hip for their own damn good. There isn't much of a "plot" in the conventional sense; Godard just swings the camera around at gorgeous hep cats and pretty kitties and the sights and sounds of Gay Paree, circa 1960 or thereabouts. There is a sense of the phoniness of surfaces, of eroticism juxtaposed against the reality of emptiness, of a man who dives headfirst into experiences, who can feel little or nothing in the way of guilt, but sees "sadness as a compromise," in a life that is either "everything or nothing."

Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is a criminal who kills a police officer. Full stop. There doesn't seem to be much else there--he escapes to Paris, looking for someone who owes him money. He's handsome, and women love him. He's a quick-witted hood modeled on Bogart who sometimes addresses the audience directly. This film breaks the Fourth Wall.

In Paris, he meets Patricia (the tragic actress Jean Seberg), who is an spiring actress and model who sells American newspapers on the street. She speaks perfect French, and throws herself on the casting couch. There seems to be some jealousy on the part of Michel, but not a sufficient amount to warrant real anger or opprobrium.

Much of their dialog seems random, pointless; doing nothing to advance the story. A scene from Oliver Stone's The Doors (1991) comes to mind, when Ray Manzarek (Kyle McLachlan) is sitting on a beach meditating, and then tries to explain to Jim Morrison (Val Kilmer, who played the role flawlessly) that "I don't need a script. Godard doesn't use a script. He improvises with the camera."

Here, Francois Truffaut (director of that OTHER famous French New Wave film, The 400 Blows, from the previous year) is credited as screenwriter. But the dialog does have an entirely life-like, improvised character to it. I missed some of it with the subtitles flashing too quickly, but I never got lost.

Patricia and Michel run away together, planning to go to Italy and hide out as two doomed lovers. However, Patricia betrays him, and the fate of both of them is written in blood on a Paris boulevard.

The final lines of dialog are quite a matter of debate.

Michel: You're disgusting.

Patricia: What did he say?

Police detective: He said, 'You're disgusting.'

Patricia: What is 'disgusting'?

The French here is ambiguous, as has been pointed out, and several different interpretations are possible. She rubs the outside of her mouth (a nod to hunger, appetite, sensuality), asking the final question directly to the audience, seemingly lost as to how 'disgusting' should be defined. Is she wanting our idea, or simply confused abou a French word, a language she sems to be fluent in? There is an insect-like detachment, emotionally, on behalf of the two main characters, these moral cripples, who want sensation, or romance, or something akin to a world they envision from the pages of magazines, images on film, and other pop cultural stimulations; yet, who are jaded to the point of insensibility. Do they really feel anything at all? They seem empty, soulless, lost in the narcissist's dream of egoistic contemplation. Seeking experience, they rush headlong to their doom.

The documentary style of the film belies the beauty of the image; even the improvised dialog never becomes dull. Breathless is a film that documents an era long in the past, a world transitioning from its post-war character to a new, liberated and questioning of ALL values and ideals age. For that reason alone, for its historical value, it should be seen. But the beauty of Godard's images are there, as well, waiting to steal our breath.

Breathless | Golden Re-release | 50th Anniversary

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