Breathless (Lies Films Impéria, Les Productions Georges Beauregard, Société Nouvelle de Cinematographique, 1960)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Rebel Without a Cause Turner Classic Movies showed another iconic film about youth rebellion, Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 directorial debut Breathless, with Jean-Paul Belmondo as a small-time crook with delusions of grandeur fueled mostly by watching Humphrey Bogart movies and adopting his trademark “look,” including a fedora; and Jean Seberg as an equally bored American-born journalist for the New York Herald-Tribune (which, despite its name, was really an English-language newspaper published in Paris) who hawks the paper on the streets and is still wearing her butch haircut from the film that made her a star, Otto Preminger’s 1957 biopic Saint Joan. I’ve never seen the alleged Breathless remake with Richard Gere from 1993 (Charles has, and h e said it’s not worth my while “unless Richard Gere really turns your crank,” which he doesn’t; when Diane Lane went extra-relational on Christopher Meloni with Richard Gere in Nights in Rodanthe I thought she was definitely trading down) and I’d only seen the 1960 Breathless once before on a PBS screening I videotaped. I didn’t like it then – for all Godard’s dedication of the film to Monogram Pictures, Monogram would never have issued a film so relentlessly overexposed (and I mean that literally!) – and I didn’t like it much better this time around either.

Breathless was written as well as directed by Godard, with help from two of the other Cahiers du Cinema writers turned film directors – François Truffaut and Chaude Chabrol (and Charles noted a scene in the film in which a copy of Cahiers du Cinema appears on-screen!),and it’s a thoroughly unpleasant and annoying story about two small-time losers who talk a lot about having sex – both with each other and with other people – but never actually do so, at least as far as we can see on screen. If there’s one aspect about Breathless that works, it’s in the relationship of the characters to the media in general and filmmaking in particular; we’re told that Michel Poiccard (Belmondo) worked as a low-level assistant at Cinecittà Studios in Rome (built by Benito Mussolini in 1937 and subsequently the playground for Federico Fellini and the other greats of Italian cinema in the immediate aftermath of World War II) and some of the scenes involving Patricia Franchini (Seberg) take place in a photographer’s studio, festooned with huge lights and reflector shields around them. We get the point that these are two individuals whose lives have been shaped by the media – in her capacity as a reporter, Patricia regularly interviews writers who’ve just published long romantic novels – and who are trying to shape their lives according to the images the media have fed them. It’s this aspect that made Breathless a more appropriate film than Rebel Without a Cause to show in a series about costume design and how the clothes worn by movie stars on screen have frequently shaped tastes in what people will wear in ordinary life.

Also one odd thing about Breathless is that, especially for a first film, it had an oddly funereal quality: the Bogart film showing when Michel is seen outside the theatre striking his pose is The Harder They Fall – Bogart’s last film, made in 1956 just before he announced his diagnosis of cancer of the esophagus – and later the record he and Patricla listen to is of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A, K. 622, the last work Mozart completed entirely by himself. (A few other pieces, notably the Requiem, were left incomplete by Mozart and finished by his student, Franz Xaver Süssmayr, after Mozart’s death – and Mozart loved Süssmayr so much he named one of his sons Franz Xaver Mozart.) But I still find Breathless a monumentally overrated film, especially by comparison with the two other movies that launched the French “New Wave” in the late 1950’s: François Trussaut’s The 400 Blows (the first in what would become a five-film cycle showing its protagonist, Antoine Doinel [Jean-Pierre Léaud] as he naturally aged through the years) and Jacques Fivette’s far less well-known Paris Belongs to Us (set and shot in 1957 but not released until 1961). The plot of Paris Belongs to Us is just as elliptical as that of Breathless, albeit ini a different way, but at least the characters have agendas and do more than just strike poses.

Also Rivette and his cinematographer, Charles L. Bitsch, filmed it quietly and effectively without the relentless overexposure in which Godard and his d.p., Raoul Coutard, indulged in Breathless. (The film also featured white subtitles even though we were watching a 2997 restoration from an outfit called – if I remember it correctly – Pixie Pictures – a number of other films have gone out with color subtitles even if the films themselves were in black-and-white, but not this one, and the white-on-white titles were frequently too much for my rapidly deteriorating eyes.) And though Jean-Paul Belmondo would become an international icon of sexiness later, here he’s still pretty nerdy-looking and one wants to take him aside and tell him, “Look, you’re not Bogart, so don’t even try to be.”