Title: Breathless
Rating: 2 Stars
When I try to come up with my Platonic ideal of an art house film, I list several attributes. First of all, it has to be subtitled. I think of the film as being French. It’s an initial entry into some avant garde movement. There’s sex. There’s interminable conversations. There are some innovative film techniques. There are pretensions to intellectualism. There’s a world weariness to it. Your initial thought after the final scene is, really?
And, oh yeah, everyone smokes. And not just any cigarette, but one of those European cigarettes that just billow smoke. You know the kind. The kind whose second hand smoke will shorten your life by seven minutes.
Well, I think that I found my Platonic ideal.
Since I’ve discovered that many of the Criterion Collection films are on HBO Max, I’ve been bingeing a bit on foreign films. I’ve now seen several Japanese, French, and Italian films. The topic of this post is the French film Breathless.
Breathless is a 1960 film by Jean-Luc Godard. It is one of the early examples of the French New Wave movement (check!). It was in French (check!) and subtitled (check!).
The story is of Michel. He’s a dangerous criminal. He steals a car and when a policeman catches him, he shoots and kills the policeman. Now a target of a nationwide manhunt, he hunts down a girlfriend in Paris, an American named Patricia. He manages to hole up in her apartment while the police search all over for him. The police catch on to Patricia’s relationship with Michel. At first she protects him, but ultimately understanding that their relationship is doomed and not wanting to go down with him, she betrays him to the police. This leads to a very long chase scene at the end of which, while breathless, he is shot. As he lies dying, Michel says that the whole scene makes him want to puke. Patricia asks the police what he said and one responds to her that Michel said that she makes him want to puke. Why did the policeman intentionally give the worse possible interpretation to her? No wonder Patricia looks confused. The ending left me confused (check!).
While hiding out in Patricia’s apartment, the two kind of have something that looks like how sex might be interpreted in 1960 (check!). They have interminable conversations about their feelings for each other (check!). They smoke so many filthy cigarettes that they can barely see each other (check!). Hilariously (at least to me), as Michel lies dying, he’s puffing on a cigarette (double check!).
One of the times that Patricia leaves the apartment is for a reporting assignment. Apparently, a French author has just released a book and is conducting a press interview. A group of reporters (including Patricia) surround the author and fire deeply philosophical questions to him that he offhandedly responds to. We’re talking meaning of life kind of questions. One of the questions was what he wanted to accomplish in his life. The author’s response is “to become immortal, and then die”. The insouciance with which he made that statement made me laugh so hard. I’m not even sure why that interview is even in the film, but it was intellectually pretentious AF (check!).
After Godard completed the film, it was way too long. Usually when that happens, the film maker cuts scenes. Godard did not want to do that. Instead, he sharply edited each scene. For instance, in a conversation, instead of the camera smoothly moving between the two people talking, instead the film cuts abruptly between the participants. He does this throughout the entire film. In so doing, he essentially invented the jump cut (check!).
If you think about the plot, it should be full of adventure. Here’s a dangerous man on the run from a nation wide police hunt. The police are bearing down upon him. He’s desperately trying to save his own skin. As he’s doing so, he finds himself falling in love with a woman. It sounds like it’d be an action packed film, but no, it moves at a nearly languid pace. No one seems to be really trying all that hard. There’s a sense of weariness to the whole affair (check!).
So, there you go, Breathless hits all of the marks of an art house film. Unfortunately, hitting all of the marks did not make it entertaining.
dorkenstein 