Breathless (1960 film)

Breathless () is a 1960 French New Wave crime drama film written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard. It stars Jean-Paul Belmondo as a wandering criminal named Michel, and Jean Seberg as his American girlfriend Patricia. The film was Godard's first feature-length work and represented Belmondo's breakthrough as an actor.

Breathless is an influential example of French New Wave (nouvelle vague) cinema. Along with François Truffaut's The 400 Blows and Alain Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour, both released a year earlier, it brought international attention to new styles of French filmmaking. At the time, Breathless attracted much attention for its bold visual style, which included then unconventional use of jump cuts.

Upon its initial release in France, the film attracted over two million viewers. It has since been considered one of the best films ever made, repeatedly appearing in Sight & Sound magazine's decennial polls of filmmakers and critics on the subject. In May 2010, a fully restored version of the film was released in the United States to coincide with the film's 50th anniversary.

American film critic of the time, Pauline Kael, called it the most important New Wave film to reach the United States.

Plot

Michel Poiccard is a young and impulsive criminal in Paris who idolizes American movie gangsters, especially Humphrey Bogart. Michel steals a car in Marseille and heads for Paris. On the way, he is pursued by a motorcycle cop. When the officer tries to arrest him, Michel impulsively shoots and kills him, then flees.

Now a wanted man, Michel arrives in Paris and seeks out Patricia Franchini, an American student and aspiring journalist who sells the New York Herald Tribune on the streets of Paris. Michel is romantically obsessed with Patricia and tries to convince her to run away with him to Italy. At first, she is uncertain about their relationship and about Michel’s criminal behavior.

Michel hides out in Patricia’s apartment and various hotel rooms, trying to evade the police while also attempting to collect money he is owed by various acquaintances. He is reckless, self-assured, and constantly talking, while Patricia is more introspective, trying to figure out what she wants from life, from love, and from Michel.

Patricia becomes increasingly suspicious of Michel’s criminal activities. She begins to suspect he killed the policeman. Though she seems drawn to his energy and bravado, she is also repelled by his instability and unpredictability.

Eventually, Patricia contacts the police and reveals Michel’s location, unsure of whether she wants to protect him or destroy him. When the police arrive, Michel tries to flee, but is shot in the back as he runs through the street. He collapses, mortally wounded.

As he lies dying, Michel speaks a few cryptic words to Patricia. She repeats them to a police officer, puzzled, then looks directly into the camera and touches her lips, mirroring Michel’s frequent gesture. Patricia questions the meaning of Michel’s final words, trying to understand him as he curses in French.

Cast

thumb|Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathless

Jean-Paul Belmondo as Michel Poiccard/Laszlo Kovacs
Jean Seberg as Patricia Franchini
Daniel Boulanger as Police Inspector Vital
Henri-Jacques Huet as Antonio Berruti
Roger Hanin as Carl Zumbach
Van Doude as Van Doude
Liliane Dreyfus as Liliane
Jean-Pierre Melville as Parvulesco
Jean-Luc Godard as an informer
Richard Balducci as Tolmachoff
Philippe de Broca as a journalist
Jean Douchet as a journalist
Gérard Brach as a photographer
Andre S. Labarthe as a journalist
Jacques Rivette as the body of the man hit by a car

Production

Background and writing

Breathless was loosely based on a newspaper article that François Truffaut read in The News in Brief about Michel Portail and his American journalist girlfriend Beverly Lynette. In November 1952, Portail stole a car to visit his sick mother in Le Havre and ended up killing a motorcycle cop named Grimberg. Truffaut wrote a treatment with Claude Chabrol, but they disagreed on the story structure.

Godard was working as a press agent at 20th Century Fox when he met producer Georges de Beauregard. He helped Beauregard with the script for Pêcheur d'Islande, but pitched him on Breathless because he liked the treatment. Chabrol and Truffaut were now star directors. They were at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1959 when they wrote Beauregard to endorse Godard as the director. Their names helped greenlight the film, but both would have very small roles in its production. Truffaut believed Godard's change to the ending was personal, "In my script, the film ends with the boy walking along the street as more and more people turn and stare after him, because his photo's on the front of all the newspapers... Jean-Luc chose a violent end because he was by nature sadder than I." The film includes many in-jokes like the young woman selling Cahiers du Cinéma and Michel's occasional alias of Laszlo Kovacs, the name of Belmondo's character in Chabrol's 1959 film Web of Passion.

Jean-Paul Belmondo was not famous outside of France prior to Breathless. In order to broaden the film's commercial appeal, Godard sought a prominent leading lady who would be willing to work in his low-budget film. He came to Jean Seberg through his acquaintance with her husband Francois Moreuil. In June 1959, Seberg agreed to appear in the film for $15,000, one-sixth of the film's budget. Godard gave Moreuil a cameo in the film.

The 1958 ethno-fiction Moi, un noir has been credited as a key influence for Godard. This can be seen in the adoption of jump-cuts, use of real locations rather than constructed sets and the documentary, newsreel format of filming.

Filming

Godard envisaged Breathless as a documentary and tasked cinematographer Raoul Coutard to shoot the entire film on a hand-held camera with next to no lighting. In order to shoot under low-light levels, Coutard had to use Ilford HP5 film, which was not available as motion picture film stock at the time. It is very often claimed that he therefore took 18-metre lengths of HP5 film sold for 35mm still cameras and spliced them into 120-metre rolls, but Coutard has denied this, saying that no splicing took place. During development he pushed the negative one stop from 400 ASA to 800 ASA.

The size of the sprocket holes in the photographic film was different from that of motion picture film, and the Eclair Cameflex camera was the only camera that worked for the film used.

Filming ran 23 days from August 17 until September 12, 1959. It included President Eisenhower's visit to Paris, which Godard used as a backdrop for the film. Michel's death was filmed on the rue Campagne-Première in Paris.

Publicity

Godard and his media-savvy friends were well-positioned to gin up publicity before the movie was released. Richard Balducci was in charge of promoting the film and he embedded a reporter from France-Observateur in the crew to report on the production. A novelization by Claude Francolin was released in February 1960, a month before the film's release. Columbia also issued a soundtrack album of Martial Solal's music. That same month, Godard was awarded the Prix Jean Vigo for his work on the film. By June of that year, it was already pointed to as "the crowning point of the new wave".

Reception for the film was mixed. The Examiner critic complained that he was unable to connect with the characters and called the film a "hodge-podge." Archer Winsten deemed it "a very fine piece of work". Though he found the film too insubstantial to be remembered, he concluded "the technique should linger, and so should these talents, here so highly visible and memorable."

In a 1972 essay about Breathless, Oliver Stone zeroed in on the bedroom scenes as the core of the film. He explains the rigidity of cinematic bedroom scenes with their "definite pace from window to bed and climactically into the sheets. Even in the rather perverse imaginations of Vadim or Chabrol, these basic rhythms operate. With Godard, no such thing." Roger Ebert included it on his "Great Movies" list in 2003, writing that "No debut film since Citizen Kane in 1942 has been as influential," dismissing its jump cuts as the biggest breakthrough, and instead calling revolutionary its "headlong pacing, its cool detachment, its dismissal of authority, and the way its narcissistic young heroes are obsessed with themselves and oblivious to the larger society."

The film has a 95% score on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 82 reviews. Its critical consensus states, "Breathless rewrote the rules of cinema -- and more than 50 years after its arrival, Jean-Luc Godard's paradigm-shifting classic remains every bit as vital".

Some modern critics have noted themes of sexism embodied in the protagonist.

Themes

Oliver Stone invokes Friedrich Nietzsche's metaphor of the "last man" during his analysis of Patricia. Stone paraphrases Thus Spoke Zarathustra, "What is pain? What is love? What is creation?...What is a star? What is anything anymore?" Stone concludes that such philosophical skepticism is a logical endpoint for a character like Patricia.

Hubert Dreyfus sees the film as exemplifying Nietzsche's conception of ("active" versus "passive") nihilism. Michel is carelessly active and bold. He falls in love with Patricia, who is uncomfortable in such engagements. Her cooperation with the police leads to his death. Patricia's monotone reaction to Michel's death indicates her brutal distance to relationships. Michel knew her coldness would end badly for him.

Closing dialogue

Michel's dying words are mumbled and hard to hear: "C'est vraiment dégueulasse". Throughout the film, "dégueulasse" has been clearly used to mean "disgusting" in reference to things like Michel's request for a loan and the music of Frédéric Chopin. The word has many other implications in French. It can be a synonym for "bitch" or "heel", as well as implying nausea and the urge to vomit.

</poem></blockquote>

English

MICHEL: It's really disgusting.

PATRICIA: What did he say?

VITAL: He said you are really disgusting.

PATRICIA: What is "disgusting"?

</poem></blockquote>

Subsequent releases of the film have differing translations:

Fox-Lorber DVD (2001)

MICHEL: It's disgusting, really.

PATRICIA: What did he say?

VITAL: He said "You're a real scumbag".

PATRICIA: What's a scumbag?

</poem></blockquote>

Criterion Collection DVD (2007)/Restoration (2010)

MICHEL: Makes me want to puke.

PATRICIA: What did he say?

VITAL: He said you make him want to puke.

PATRICIA: What's that mean, "puke"?</poem></blockquote>

References to other films

Breathless is shot through with constant in-jokes and references to other films:

Legacy

Godard said the success of Breathless was a mistake. He added "there used to be just one way. There was one way you could do things. There were people who protected it like a copyright, a secret cult only for the initiated. That's why I don't regret making Breathless and blowing that all apart." In 1964, Godard described his and his colleagues' impact: "We barged into the cinema like cavemen into the Versailles of Louis XV."

2012: Top Films of All Time, #13
2012: Directors' Top Films, #11
2022: Critics' Top Films of All Time, #38
2022: Director's Top Films of All Time, #15

The BBC has also listed Breathless:

2018: Greatest Foreign Language Films, #11

References

External links

À Bout De Souffle soundtrack at Discogs.
Breathless on NewWaveFilm.com

Breathless (1960 film)

Plot

Cast

Production

Background and writing

Filming

Publicity

Themes

Closing dialogue

References to other films

Legacy

See also

References

Further reading

External links