BFI Top 50: Breathless, Released in 1960, Directed by Jean-Luc Godard

What I know going in

I know all the basic plot beats of the film (criminal shoots a cop, goofs off with a pixie-ish American, and is ultimately betrayed by her). Through years of the casual attention I have paid to movie, I know the film is famous for its use of disruptive jump-cuts, straight-to-camera addresses, and a free-form handheld style of cinematography. I did not enjoy the other two Godard films I watched as part of this marathon (Pierot le Fouand Contempt) mainly because I found the story and character beats repetitive. Hopefully, Breathless, as Godard’s first film, will be a little less controlled than those two other films.

 

Immediate reaction

Well… I will say this, Breathless is easily the Godard film I have enjoyed the most. Warning, that is not saying a whole lot considering I was completely indifferent to Pierot le Fou and thought Contempt was a total slog. The main thing that kept me engaged with the film was its style, which is a little less mannered than Godard’s later works. The use of jump cuts and the perfectly rough handheld cinematography gave the film a wonderful off-the-cuff feel. This was enhanced by the film’s jokey appropriation of genre tropes. For example, the entirety of a typical noir plotline basically occurs in the background film, and the ways in which Godard cuts corners to represent standard action scenes are inventive and a lot of fun to behold. Furthermore, on a macro-level, the two main characters can be matched to noir stereotypes with Jean-Paul Belmondo as the hardened criminal enraptured with a beautiful woman and Jean Seberg as the femme fatale that ultimately betrays him (obviously these characters are much more nuanced than that suggests). In addition, the entire film is wrapped in the bow of an amazing soundtrack that swings breezily from amped-up Eurospy tunes, jazzy crime beats, classical music, and contemporary French pop songs.

 

Unfortunately, I did not find the film as radical as I was expecting. This is mainly due to a simple fact I cannot view the film in its original context, which means I have seen the films that influenced, and were influenced by, Breathless. Given the opportunity to transport myself back to 1960 and zap away any knowledge of film history after that time, I would gladly take it, but that probably won’t be happening to me anytime soon. Now there are plenty of highly-influential, classic films that seemed as fresh and new to me as they day they were released (Metropolis, Psycho), but Breathless did not hit me the way some older movies have. The main reason for this is that a few months ago I watched the Czech film Daisies, made after Breathless, but around the same time (1966). If Godard’s debut took some genre basics as a skeleton to spin a wonky, brash tale, Daisies one-ups that by having no genre. It gleefully eschews all forms of narrative coherence, works as a giant fuck-you to patriarchy and communism, and has characters that literally push, pull, and cut themselves through the film. It’s a punk film made before the word even came into existence. Indeed, Breathless is woefully staid when compared to that film. Again, I know that’s not really a fair criticism as I’m sure Breathless was an influence on Daisies, but that’s also the background I brought into the film so I have to be honest about the reasons for my slight indifference regarding Breathless.

Where Godard’s other two films failed for me were with the characters. I’ve found that they tend to repeat the same arguments and make huge deals out of petty concerns due to a willful lack of communication. Of course, I’m not against portrayals of flawed or even just outright mean, characters, but I do require that they are flawed in interesting ways. This applies to Breathless mainly through the Michel character, played by Jean-Paul Belmondo. Look, this character is just an outright, irredeemable asshole. He lies, steals cars for a living, freely divests random passerby’s and old flames from their cash, flicks match stubs in annoyingly self-consciously cool manner, thinks only of sex, and frequently insults Patricia, played by Jean Seberg. The fact that the film was trying to push Belmondo’s character as the next cool icon of masculinity on par with Bogart supremely pissed me off. There is just nothing interesting going on with this character! He’s not a loner with a heart of gold or a misunderstood criminal, he’s just a dick and the fact that any woman, even the naïve foreigner Patricia, would fall for him just completely broke my engagement with the film.

 

One last beef, and then I will move on, promise. This is a huge cinematic pet peeve of mine, but it really angers me when a film starts to make very broad generalizations about men and women. I believe that the only difference between the two sexes is purely biological. There are women who can train, think, drink, smoke, and drive harder, better, longer, more, and better than any man. When a film starts trying to draw imaginary lines, based more on false media stereotypes than any reality, between the two genders it immediately gets me enraged. The majority of the conversations in Breathless focus around this topic so you can imagine my supreme frustration with much of the film’s dialogue. I am honestly beginning to think that Godard is a bit of a misogynist. I am not going to go as far and say that Michel is an explicit, on-screen representation of the director, but the female characters from the films I have seen all correspond to different, negative female stereotypes (shrill temptress in Pierot le Fou, petty ice-queen in Contempt, and naïf in Breathless).

 

It may seem like I am taking a certain amount of glee in slaughtering one of the sacred cows of film history, but it honestly stresses me out that my reaction to Godard’s films is mostly negative. People who have spent their entire lives breathing film, academics, and other directors have expounded at length and even written entire books on Godard. I recognize there is absolutely no argument I, with my extremely limited knowledge of cinema and poor writing skills, could possibly make that would somehow convince anyone that I’m right and everyone else is wrong. I am very aware of that fact and I really wish my personal response to Godard’s films aligned with critical consensus, but it doesn’t and I don’t know what I can do about it.

 

Further thoughts

I am not sure what else I can add. The one intriguing idea I came upon while reading up on the film had to do with Belmondo’s persona in the film. As mentioned above, the surface-level aspects of his character that grated on me may have blinded me to what was really going on. It is entirely possible that Michel reads as overly affected and shallow because he has taken all of his tics from movies (as indicated by his obsession with Bogart) without having the charisma and bravado to really pull that persona off. It is also possible that Godard intentionally amped up some of the more negative aspects of stock male noir/crime archetypes and plopped the character into a more realistic setting in order to comment on the underlying dickishness and misogyny present in these characters.

 

One other thing I forgot to mention, Breathless is a shockingly intimate film. Characters walk around half-naked, explicitly talk about sex, and immoral actions are celebrated. Along with other 1960 films such as Psycho, Breathless was a part of the last push necessary to rid film of any lingering residue of the production cod of Old Hollywood. If Joseph Breen could have seen this film, he might have died on the spot.

 

Why does the film belong on this list?

While Breathless was not the first film to use jump cuts, documentary-style cinematography in a fictional story, or muck around with genre and improvisation, it did combine all of those things into a revolutionary whole and ushered the New Wave into the mainstream.