Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.
My experience to date with the films of Jean-Luc Godard is quite limited. I’ve seen only Weekend and A Bout de Souffle (called Breathless in its English subtitle version). I’ll hold my overall opinion of Godard in abeyance, for now, since I now have two quite contrary experiences. Weekend I found to be a sorry excuse for a movie (despite, rather than because of, the obvious defiance of conventions) but Breathless is a highly impressive and enjoyable work. I watched Breathless today for what I thought going in was the first time, but I now suspect that I saw this film previously many years ago. Either way, it was a compelling experience.
Historical Context: The French New Wave (“La Nouvelle Vague” in French) had its origins among a group of film critics that wrote for an influential film magazine called “Cahiers du Cinema.” This group included Francois Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, and Jean-Luc Godard. These critics railed against the polish, formality, poetic realism, and direct narrative style of the French films of the 1930’s, 1940’s and early 1950’s. These critics turned directors got their chance to put their ideas into practice in the late 1950’s. Chabrol struck first with Le Beau Serge (1958), which received critical acclaim, but the real banner year for the New Wave was 1959, which saw the release of Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour, Rohmer’s The Sign of Leo, and Jean-Luc Godard’s marvelous film, Breathless. While Truffaut’s film remains a classic, it was Godard’s film that was the most radical departure from the old style and which most influenced future filmmaking. In fact, Breathless revolutionized filmmaking to an extent that few other films can boast (those few might include Birth of a Nation (1915), The Battleship Potemkin (1925), and Citizen Kane (1942)). The most revolutionary aspect of Breathless, the so-called “jump-cuts,” came about more by accident than intention. When filming was completed, Godard found that his film was about a half hour too long and rather than delete a scene or two, he opted instead to cut everything he considered boring pretty much across the film’s entire length, even though such abrupt cuts were contrary to the accepted wisdom of filmmaking at the time. The incredible result, however, was to increase the pacing and energy of the film as well as the feeling of improvised informality and gritty realism. The technique has been used widely ever since in action films.
Breathless also introduced other Godard film signatures, including frequent references to other directors and film classics as well as self-indulgent in-jokes and self-references that only those closest to Godard or the making of the film, or film geeks, could understand. The protagonist in Breathless, Michel, is overtly patterned after Humphrey Bogart, as even the character himself understands. He literally practices his Bogart-like mannerisms. Godard had a fascination with Hollywood’s gangster and noir films. Godard has his protagonists hiding, at one point, in a movie theater, making out, while the movie in the background, Westbound (1958), provides dialog descriptive of their situation. Then, there are references to other New Wave directors (two even appear in the film), a painter (Renoir) whose son was a film director, an author (Faulker) who also wrote film scripts, and a cameo by Godard himself. Personally, I am not particularly enamored with these silly references, but one need not necessarily pay them any heed. They’re not necessary to the enjoyment of the film nor do they get in the way.
The Story: Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is a charismatic thug and auto-thief, who swaggers about with the look of a tough guy – like the young Marlon Brando of On the Waterfront. His face is somewhat gaunt but his lips are full and his signature gesture is to run his thumb across the outside of his lower lip. From time to time, he practices imitating Bogart in the mirror. He is small-minded and hedonistic but he has both boyish charm and panache. He steals a car and speeds along a country road, passing cars with abandon, and is soon being pursued by two cops on motorcycles. He nearly outruns them, but the hot-wire comes loose and one of the cops spots his vehicle where he has hastily pulled off the road amidst a clump of trees. When the officer approaches, Michel kills him with a gun from the glove compartment of the stolen car. The police are able to identify him as the cop-killer from fingerprints in the car and the rest of the film consists of Michel on the lam and the police closing in.
Michel heads for Paris to reconnect with an American girl, Patricia (Jean Seberg), who he is in love with (or at least carnally obsessed with) despite himself. She sells newspapers on the street while waiting to enroll at the Sorbonne. The remainder of the film mainly explores their relationship. It is not until near the end that she realizes that he is a thief and murderer, wanted by the police, as well as a married man. She is pregnant, presumably by Michel, and is trying to determine if she loves him, if he loves her, and if they have any future together. She is also struggling between her naturally independent spirit and the likelihood that she will soon have a child. He wants to be with her and making love as often as possible, but has no concept of responsibility even in relation to himself, much less her or a baby.
Themes: The obvious theme of this film is like that in many famous outlaw road movies – short-sighted hedonistic antihero rushes headlong to self-destruction. Nothing especially surprising or original as far as that goes. Michel is violent, reckless, and selfish but also shares two of the admirable qualities of that quintessentially French hero Cyrano de Bergerac – his panache and his refusal to compromise who he is. When Patricia indicates her concurrence with a quote from Faulker (“Between grief and nothing, I will take grief”), Michel retorts that he would prefer nothing because “grief is a compromise.” We see that Michel is not totally devoid of admirable personal qualities – as companions for his boyish charm and good looks. Nevertheless, an uncompromising disposition is really only admirable when associated with lofty ideals (as in Cyrano’s case) rather than pursuit of hedonistic pleasures (as with Michel). Still, Michel is the kind of criminal for whom we can’t help also having a bit of grudging admiration as a romantic rebel. He personifies repressed desires that many of us harbor (many men at least; I’m not so sure if this applies to women) to choose anarchy over authority.
The “message” in relation to Patricia is tougher to extract from this film. One reviewer refers to her actions at the end of the film as “betrayal” while another wonders if she should be viewed as even more evil than Michel because she is less deluded. Until Patricia is confronted by the Police Inspector fairly near the end of the film, she really has no idea that Michel is a wanted criminal and murderer. He has systematically lied to her about his activities and she is naïve enough to buy his cover. Her initial reaction when she learns the truth is to help him allude the police. Then, she briefly gets caught up in the excitement of being on the run. At the first pause, however, she begins to realize that her actions are carrying her to a dead end. She has also learned that Michel is married, though he apparently abandoned his wife long ago. He claims to not even remember which one left the other – hardly a good recommendation for a would-be partner. It has finally become obvious to her that there is no future for her or her baby-to-be in a relationship with Michel. She previously discovered that he is exceptionally persistent and tough to discourage. He stole the key to her apartment and settled in despite her having deflected his earlier initiatives to extract an invitation from her. She realizes that the only way to fully extract herself is to drive him away. I think that she fully expected him to split immediately when she announced that she had called the police. He still had plenty of time to get away and she probably anticipated that the combination of calling the police and then telling him that she had would get him out of her life. Instead, he made a choice that she could not have anticipated – death instead of the “compromise” of life without her. As he lay dying, he repeated the series of three facial expressions that he had earlier used to convey to her the meaning of the phrase “sour grapes.” That phrase means, of course, convincing oneself that what one cannot have is not desirable anyway. Michel, in his uncompromising way, was indicating that he had decided that if he couldn’t have life with Patricia, he wasn’t going to settle for living at all.
Production Values: The screenplay for A Bout de Souffle was written by Truffaut, a further instance of the interrelatedness of the various New Wave directors, at least in the early days. As time went on, however, Truffaut gradually became more conservative in his film making approach while Godard became increasingly iconoclastic and experimental, and the two went their separate ways.
Godard succeeded in this – his inaugural film – to create something that was hip, fresh, and packed with magnetic energy, while at the same time being technically innovative. Using the jump cut technique, he fashioned an opening montage that quickly established the story in just a few minutes, before either the location or the essential nature of the principal character had been substantially developed. Character development he left for later in the film, after viewers were already engrossed in the story. The film’s centerpiece consisted of a half-hour long set-piece in the bedroom of Patricia’s apartment with minimal action but featuring dialog both brilliant and engaging. Here we learn about their respective desires, doubts, needs, and character (and, partly, lack thereof). They are each playfully innocent but frightfully naïve and immature. Each talks about their respective notions of how to live, but those notions involve precious little overlap. Later, in a rare burst of insight, Michel comments, remorsefully, “When we talked, I talked about me, you talked about you, when we should have talked about each other.”
Another innovative device used by Godard was to have Michel speak directly to the audience while riding in the stolen car near the beginning of the film, breaking the proverbial fourth wall. One result was to momentarily put us in the car next to him. Another was to make the entire filmmaking process more self-conscious than it typically is.
A Bout de Souffle was a low-budget film-making effort. Some of its innovations were necessitated by cost limitations, rather than purposeful improvements. The cinematography made extensive use of hand-held cameras. In some scenes, the cameraman was pushed along in a wheelchair because camera tracks were too costly. The resultant grainy texture of the film turned out to be a blessing in disguise, adding to the earthiness of the rough characters and settings.
This film made Belmondo famous and he went on to become the biggest French star of his generation, succeeded later by Gerard Depardieu. Seberg’s career, on the other hand, was resurrected by her performance in Breathless, after she had been savagely panned for her first two appearances in American films, Saint Joan (1957) and Bonjour Tristesse (1958), both directed by Otto Preminger. She makes it easy to believe that Michel could be obsessed with Patricia because Seberg radiates both cuteness on the outside and that elusive inner sparkle that really turns men on.
Bottom-Line:A Bout de Souffle has the general feel of a film like Bonnie and Clyde – in fact, the latter film was clearly derivative of Godard's great antecedent. More broadly, many film tough guys from Pacino to De Niro can be considered derivative of Belmondo’s Michel, though he in turn was derivative of Bogart. Although the locales of A Bout de Souffle are utterly French, the romantic tough guy is universal. A Bout de Souffle was audacious in the extent to which it broke rules of conventional filmmaking that existed at the time of its production. If Godard’s innovations seem less radical today in watching this film than they appeared in 1959, it is precisely because of the great influence that this film had on what followed.
A Bout de Souffle is in French with English subtitles except for one brief conversation that is in English with French subtitles. It is in black-and-white with a running time is 89 minutes. Although it is not rated, I would judge it to be appropriate for age 13 and above. There is no nudity or explicit sex and the two killings are not particularly graphic.
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