Meet Michel. He’s a small time car thief and Humphrey Bogart
impersonating gangster type whose life gets thrown into a bit of disarray when
he kills a cop and makes it a point to flee to Paris to collect some money he’s
owed and escape to Italy with the woman he loves. With a ruthless detective hot
on his trail, his lover not entirely convinced that she really loves him, and
the man who owes him money proving difficult to track down, Michel is running
out of time and patience.
Filmic debut from French cinephile and critic
Jean-Luc Godard, Breathless stands as
an iconic feature prominent in the days of the French New Wave movement.
Although the spotlight didn’t shine on this movement for long, films that came
out during the French New Wave were special in that they were innovative, intertextual
artworks that revitalised specific underappreciated areas of cinema and paid
homage to American movies. Whilst many of the tricks and classic moments of Breathless are now commonplace for
modern audiences, there is still cleverness and a love of film to be taken away
from it; it’s very reflective of its filmmaker.
Meet Michel. He’s a small time
car thief and Humphrey Bogart impersonating gangster type whose life gets
thrown into a bit of disarray when he kills a cop and makes it a point to flee
to Paris to collect some money he’s owed and escape to Italy with the woman he
loves. With a ruthless detective hot on his trail, his lover not entirely
convinced that she really loves him, and the man who owes him money proving
difficult to track down, Michel is running out of time and patience.
Whilst it
can be argued, particularly by modern viewers, that much of Breathless is just references and homage
to other films as well as intertexual cues and various scenes lifted right out
of American cinema, it cannot be denied that the film still manages to keep
bums in seats and eyes on screens. I narrow this down to the work of the
reinvention of the jump cut, which is a prominent feature of the movie. Jump
cuts are used every which way but loose in this film, combating the boringness
of the minimal plotline with bouts of audience displacement in time, but not
space. The pace of the film is like that of a learner driver learning on a
manual car, in that it suddenly spurts forward and then stalls a bit. Where
jump cuts are often used in film to suddenly change places in space and time,
Godard employs them merely to jump over any boring moments that don’t have to
be seen on screen. As a result, the film and the audience in thrown forward by
a few minutes in time and curiosity compels the audience to remain in their
seats as they try to get their bearings and take in the interesting things now
happening on screen. It’s simple but clever filmmaking: a true example of ‘it’s
the simple things in life you treasure’.
Starring Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean
Seberg, Daniel Boulanger, Jean-Pierre Melville, Henri-Jacques Huet, Van Doude,
Claude Mansard, Richard Balducci, Roger Hanin, Jean-Louis Richard, Liliane
David, Jean Domarchi, Jean Douchet, Raymond Huntley, Andre S. Labarthe,
Francois Moreuil, Liliane Robin, and Godard himself, Breathless is an intriguing indulgence in cinematic appreciation. The film exhibits both a love of movies and a care with
technical execution. If French movies and artistic films of any shape or form
fascinate you, I’d recommend you give this a go.
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