Breathless

Breathless – When I saw that Turner Classic Movies was showing Jean-Luc Godard’s 1961 Breathless, naturally I assumed that the director had died. (He hasn’t – the film was shown as part of a promotion for a “ten” or “hundred” or “thousand” best movie list published by Entertainment Weekly.) Anything by Godard is always worth a second-look and Breathless is the director’s most characteristic and endearing film, the picture that made him famous and that changed the shape of the movies. From the outset, Godard was rebarbative and Breathless may be approached as an essay in film criticism: the director explicates and deconstructs American gangster films, particularly the Grade Z low-budget pictures – the movie is dedicated to “Monogram Pictures” – in the picture. I’ve seen the movie many times and have never been able to keep it in my mind. This is because there is very little plot or action in the ordinary sense of the word in the film. No one has ever dared to attempt, let alone achieve, the peculiar rhythms that Godard uses in his pictures. Like Contempt and many of his other early films, Breathless starts at a reckless pace, hurtling its banal plot forward with elliptical cutting and a mise-en-scene that sketches events as opposed to showing them. But, then, when Godard’s young lovers are together on screen, time suddenly stops. At least, a third of the film, probably more, is devoted to an enormously protracted scene where Godard’s characters are stalled in the heroine’s apartment, flirting, quoting novels, mugging for the camera and teasing one another. Belmondo’s puppyish thug constantly importunes Jean Seberg’s American girl with demands for sex which she seem to reluctantly reject – this goes on for almost a half-hour in a film that is less than ninety minutes long. This duet for the camera is a hommage to Seberg’s extraordinary beauty, Belmondo’s beautiful ugliness, and Godard’s sheer inventiveness and bravado in his use of the confined space of the tiny Parisian apartment – it’s intentionally trivial, the opposite of the spectacle that ordinarily draws us to the movies, more than a little bit dull at times, and draws into question the subject of the movie: what is Breathless really about? Despite his politics, obscurity, and intentionally estranging style, Godard was always, at heart, a mogul of the old school – his films explore Hollywood genres and exploit good old-fashioned star appeal. Godard was always star-struck by his leading ladies whether Seberg or Brigitte Bardot in Contempt or, later, Jane Fonda and Anna Karenina. But his films are great precisely by rejecting or questioning everything about what makes a film “great” and noteworthy.