A bout de souffle

Jean-Luc Godard (1960)

In the English-speaking world, its name is an inseparable part of the film’s cachet but it’s actually a thin reduction of the richness of the French title.  There’s no obvious way of rendering neatly in English the ‘end of’ element of ‘à bout’ but ‘Out of Breath’ would be more expressive.  The principal characters are Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a petty crook who – before the film is ten minutes old – has become a killer on the run in Paris; and Patricia (Jean Seberg), his shallowly cultured American journalist girlfriend.  They are ‘living in the moment’.  Godard takes that to mean living superficially and irresponsibly but living too with a degree of existential awareness.  Michel says that he thinks about death all the time and, although the young man has a penchant for striking, thoughtless statements, we don’t get the sense that this is a lie.  A bout de souffle reflects, with almost amused detachment, a strong sense of the proximity of death to life, of how death is always only a breath or a heedless action away.   We register this in the death of a man in a street accident as much as in the end of the policeman whom Michel kills.

Michel’s own death – the film’s penultimate sequence – is extended, a bravura piece of camerawork and of acting.  I knew that Breathless was innovative in terms of its visual style (hand-held camera, jump cuts etc) and treatment of characters – but I was knocked out by Belmondo.  I’ve seen very few of his films and he was fixed in my mind as an established, fortyish French film star of a particular type – a cool man of action.   He was in his mid-twenties when he made Breathless (this was his breakthrough role) and I was unprepared for his raw originality.  Belmondo is perfectly at ease in front of the camera; he’s completely relaxed and completely alert.  He gives you the fun of theatricality through an art that conceals art – in the way he makes faces, smokes cigarettes, repeats the gesture of rubbing his upper lip (reprised by Jean Seberg in the final shot of Patricia after Michel’s death).   Belmondo does seem the essence of a French tradition of macho-on-the-edge-of-the-law.  He evokes a tradition of charming gangsters and the melancholy of Bogart; at the same time he’s fresh and individual.  It’s great screen acting:  as Michel, Belmondo fully and, it seems, effortlessly inhabits the body of the character and expresses his thoughts.  Compared with him, Jean Seberg is more evidently acting but she’s an amazing camera subject:  she gives Patricia an impacted, intransigent quality – the girl seems dissociated in a way that complements Michel’s ultimate inaccessibility.  And because the magnetism of Belmondo and Seberg draws you towards them, there’s a powerful tension between this and the emotional distance their characters maintain.

Breathless may also be a trailblazing film in that it features protagonists who are charming but amoral.  Michel and Patricia are impelled by personal desire and without any sense of responsibility to others or any sense of proportion.  Their relationship is romantic and erotic because of the actors but subversive in relation to the sentiments of a conventional love story on screen.  When Michel says to Patricia, ‘I can’t live without you’, she replies, ‘Of course you can’.  To which he responds, ‘Yes, but I don’t want to.’  I loved the way the film moved from quick, jolting sequences to the long, fascinating scene in the couple’s cramped bedroom:  the exchanges between them there develop the physical and moral texture of their relationship in a grippingly enjoyable way.

Godard famously dedicated Breathless to Monogram pictures, who churned out cheap gangster films, but he goes way beyond the lineaments of a genre picture.  In addition to its technical originality, Breathless gets at essential aspects of cinema’s power and allure.   A number of famous directors, including Godard himself, have walk-on parts or cameos.  The most expansive of these is provided by Jean-Pierre Melville as Parvulesco, a famous novelist who’s being interviewed by journalists, including Patricia.   Much of this funny scene plays as a satire of (a particularly French?) tradition of celebrity artists making lapidary pronouncements on the universe but one of Parvulesco’s bons mots – in answer to a question about what he most wants to achieve – has a resonance that, nearly half a century after Breathless was made, overpowers its sarcastic wit.   ‘I want to become immortal then die’.  It’s a joke but it expresses a truth about the everlasting life of great screen performers and film-makers.

I can’t begin to do justice to this film.

28 April 2009