| Breathless | |
| Native Name: | |
| Director: | Jean-Luc Godard |
| Screenplay: | Jean-Luc Godard |
| Producer: | Georges de Beauregard |
| Cinematography: | Raoul Coutard |
| Editing: | Cécile Decugis |
| Music: | Martial Solal |
| Studio: | Les Films Impéria |
| Distributor: | Société nouvelle de cinématographie |
| Runtime: | 90 minutes |
| Country: | France |
| Budget: | FRF 400,000(US$80,000)[1] |
| Gross: | 2,295,912 admissions (France)[2] [3] |
Breathless (French: '''À bout de souffle'''|lit=Out of Breath) 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.[4] 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, appearing in Sight & Sound magazine's decennial polls of filmmakers and critics on the subject on multiple occasions. In May 2010, a fully restored version of the film was released in the United States to coincide with the film's 50th anniversary.
Michel is a youthful, dangerous criminal who models himself on the film persona of Humphrey Bogart. After stealing a car in Marseille, Michel shoots and kills a policeman who has followed him onto a country road. Penniless and on the run from the police, he turns to an American love interest, Patricia, a student and aspiring journalist, who sells the New York Herald Tribune on the boulevards of Paris. The ambivalent Patricia unwittingly hides him in her apartment as he simultaneously tries to seduce her and call in a loan to fund their escape to Italy. Patricia says she is pregnant, probably with Michel's child. When the police question her, Patricia realizes that Michel is on the run. Eventually she betrays him, but before the police arrive, she tells Michel what she has done. He is somewhat resigned to a life in prison, and does not try to escape at first. A friend of his arrives and attempts to hand him a gun, but he refuses. As the police arrive, the friend drives off, but throws the gun towards Michel, who picks it up. The police shoot him in the street, and after running along the block, he collapses. As Patricia stands over the dying Michel, he curses her with his last words, but she does not understand his French.[5]
Breathless was loosely based on an article François Truffaut read in The News in Brief about Michel Portail and his American 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.[6] 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.[6]
The final screenplay deviates very little from Truffaut's original treatment, aside from the much longer bedroom scene. Godard wrote the script as he went along. He told Truffaut, "the subject will be the story of a boy who thinks of death and of a girl who doesn't."[7] 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."[8] [7]
Godard used screenwriter Paul Gégauff, who was known as a swaggering seducer of women, as inspiration for Michel's character. [6] Fellow New Wave director Jacques Rivette appears in a cameo as the dead body of a man hit by a car in the street.[9] 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.[10] 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.[6] During filming, Seberg privately questioned Godard's style and wondered if the film would be commercially viable. After it was a success, she reprised her character in Godard's Le Grand Escroc.[10]
Godard wanted cinematographer Michel Latouche to shoot the film after working with him on his short films. Instead, De Beauregard hired Raoul Coutard, who he had on contract.[11]
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.[12] [13]
Godard envisaged Breathless as a reportage (documentary), and tasked cinematographer Raoul Coutard to shoot the entire film on a hand-held camera with next to no lighting.[14] 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. He therefore took 18-metre lengths of HP5 film sold for 35mm still cameras and spliced them into 120-metre rolls. During development he pushed the negative one stop from 400 ASA to 800 ASA.[15]
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.[11] Nearly the entire film had to be dubbed in post-production because the Cameflex was noisy and incapable of synchronized sound.[11] [16]
Filming began on August 17, 1959 and ran through September. It also included U.S. President Eisenhower's September 2-3 visit to Paris. [17] Godard met his crew at the Café Notre Dame near the Hôtel de Suède and shot for two hours until he ran out of ideas. Coutard has stated that the film was virtually improvised on the spot, and that Godard wrote lines of dialogue in an exercise book that no one else was allowed to see.[6] Godard gave the lines to Belmondo and Seberg with only a few brief rehearsals of scenes before filming them.
No permission was received to shoot the film in its various locations (mainly the side streets and boulevards of Paris), adding to the spontaneous feel for which Godard was aiming.[18] However, all locations were selected before shooting began, and assistant director Pierre Rissient has described the shoot as very organized. Actor Richard Balducci has stated that shooting days ranged from 15 minutes to 12 hours, depending on how many ideas Godard had on a given day. Producer Georges de Beauregard wrote a letter to the entire crew complaining about the erratic shooting schedule. Coutard said that when de Beauregard encountered Godard at a café on a day on which Godard had called in sick, the two engaged in a fistfight.[11]
Godard shot most of the film chronologically, with the exception of the first sequence, which was filmed toward the end of the shoot. Filming at the Hôtel de Suède for the lengthy bedroom scene with Michel and Patricia included a minimal crew and no lights. The location was difficult to secure, but Godard was determined to shoot there after having lived at the hotel after returning from South America in the early 1950s. Instead of renting a dolly with complicated and time-consuming tracks to lay, Godard and Coutard rented a wheelchair that Godard often pushed himself.[11] For certain street scenes, Coutard hid in a postal cart with a hole for the lens and packages piled on top of him. Shooting lasted for 23 days and ended on 12 September 1959. The final scene in which Michel is shot in the street was filmed on the rue Campagne-Première in Paris.[6]
Writing for Combat magazine in 1960, Pierre Marcabru observed: "It seems that, if we had footage of Godard shooting his film, we would discover a sort of accord between the dramatized world in front of the camera (Belmondo and Seberg playing a scene) and the working world behind it (Godard and Raoul Coutard shooting the scene), as if the wall between the real and projected worlds had been torn down."
Breathless was processed and edited at GTC Labs in Joinville by Cécile Decugis and his assistant Lila Herman. Decugis said the film earned a pre-release reputation as the worst film of the year.[6]
Coutard said that "there was a panache in the way it was edited that didn't match at all the way it was shot. The editing gave it a very different tone than the films we were used to seeing." The film's use of jump cuts has been called innovative. Andrew Sarris analyzed it as existentially representing "the meaninglessness of the time interval between moral decisions."[19] Assistant director Pierre Rissient said that the jump cut style was not intended during the film's shooting or the initial stages of editing.[11]
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.[7]
Breathless was on the cover of Cahiers du cinéma's January issue, months before its release.[20] That same month, Godard was awarded the Prix Jean Vigo for his work on the film.[9] Luc Moullet wrote, "Of all the films now being made by the newcomers to French cinema, À bout de souffle is not the best, since Les 400 coups has a head start on it; it is not the most striking - we have Hiroshima mon amour for that. But it is the most representative."[21] By June of that year, it was already pointed to as "the crowning point of the new wave".[22]
Bosley Crowther called the film a "fascinating communication" which is "emphatically unrestrainedly vicious, completely devoid of moral tone" and shocking due to the "vigor of its reportorial candor". Crowther described Godard's editing as "pictorial cacophony". He saw Belmondo as "hypnotically ugly" and "the most effective cigarette-mouther and thumb-to-lip rubber since time began".[23] 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."[24]
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."
Richard Brody enthused, "Breathless opened...not in an art house but at a chain of four commercial theaters, selling 259,046 tickets in four weeks. The eventual profit was substantial...The film's success with the public corresponded to its generally ardent and astonished critical reception."[9]
The New York Times critic A. O. Scott wrote in 2010, 50 years after the release of Breathless, that it is both "a pop artifact and a daring work of art" and even at 50, "still cool, still new, still – after all this time! – a bulletin from the future of movies."[25] 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."[26]
The film has a 96% score on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 76 reviews.[27]
The Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa cited this movie as one of his 100 favorite films.[28]
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?"[29] Stone concludes that such philosophical skepticism is a logical endpoint for a character like Patricia.[30]
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.[31]
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.
OriginalMICHEL: C'est vraiment dégueulasse.PATRICIA: Qu'est-ce qu'il a dit?VITAL: Il a dit que vous êtes vraiment "une dégueulasse".PATRICIA: Qu'est-ce que c'est "dégueulasse"?[32] [33]
EnglishMICHEL: It's really disgusting.PATRICIA: What did he say?VITAL: He said you are really disgusting.PATRICIA: What is "disgusting"?
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?
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"?
Breathless is shot through with constant in-jokes and references to other films:[19]
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."[11] In 1964, Godard described his and his colleagues' impact: "We barged into the cinema like cavemen into the Versailles of Louis XV."[9]
The British Film Institute included the film on several lists in its Sight and Sound magazine:
The BBC has also listed Breathless:
Includes Continuity Script, Truffaut's treatment, interviews, and many reviews of the film.