Coosa Creek Mambo

Ok. I admit it. When I first saw Breathless, I was underwhelmed. I mean, what was the point? These two rather good-looking people (well, Jean Seberg’s good-looking, anyway) wandering around Paris with badly-dubbed sound and jerky editing, and the acting wasn’t exactly the most natural I’d ever seen, either, and what was that ending? Could it be any more obvious, he makes those faces and she wipes her lip? Yeah, yeah, Jean-Luc . . . we get it, already.

Then a friend of mine gave me some advice, he said the first thing you have to do with Breathless is just to let go, to feel it as it washes over you. Don’t think about the jump-cuts or the headlong pacing; don’t ruminate over the place of the film in cinematic history as you watch it. Just watch it.

And so I did. I popped Criterion’s stunning new disc into the DVD player and went with the flow. I entered into its syncopated, stutter-step rhythms and let its cool piano jazz carry me along. I soaked in the gorgeous photography, immersed in the loving evocation of a Paris that cued up of happy memories of my own. With Breathless, I was down on the streets with Seberg and Belmondo, an unobtrusive third person in their story. And lo and behold, the second time was the charm. I was won over.

Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is a small-time hood who dreams of making it big. He models himself after all the American stars, especially Bogart, in the way he dresses and talks and acts. At the outset of the film, he steals a big American car–we are not told how he came to do so–and takes off through the French countryside. He kills a policeman who’s been following him and suddenly, he’s wanted for murder. In Paris, he hooks up with an old girlfriend, Patricia Francini (Seberg), an American who sells the New York Herald Tribune on the streets. The film follows them as they talk and flirt and make love, as the police gradually tighten the noose.

Of course, the plot is entirely beside the point. Breathless has become an icon, a turning point in the history of film. As the blurb on Criterions packaging says: “There was before Breathless, and there was after Breathless. It revolutionized both technique andcontent, both form and function. Roger Ebert, in his fine 2003 “Great Movie” essay writes says this about it:

“It is dutifully repeated that Godard’s technique of “jump cuts” is the great breakthrough, but startling as they were, they were actually an afterthought, and what is most revolutionary about the movie is 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.”

Undoubtedly. But we come to any piece of art with our own context, our own baggage, and I cut my teeth on the anti-hero movies of Hollywood’s golden age, like Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider, both of whom owe a massive debt to Breathless. So what is important to me is the joyous feel of it all, created largely by Godard’s unusual technique and shooting methods. He famously wrote each day’s shooting script in a sidewalk cafe the morning of the shoot; this gave their performances a certain immediacy–for them, the action was just happening. Godard eschewed Hollywood conventions like establishing shots and “buttons” on the ends of scenes, and directed his actors like a battlefield genaeral, yelling out what he wanted them to do as they went along. All the sound was dubbed in later.

His cinematographer, the legendary Raoul Coutard, began as a news photographer, and was adept at disappearing into the woodwork. Together with Godard, he devised a way to shoot at extremely high speed for the day (400 ASA, pushed to 800), negating the need for artificial light. They shot in a guerrilla style, with hand-held techniques, before there were hand-held cameras. When you see it, it’s obvious that the Paris streets were not cleared of “innocent bystanders,” and that they were shooting among the everyday city hoi polloi.

All of this added up to a great intimacy, a stunning naturalness, that is a hallmark of the film. When I watch it, I feel like it’s all just naturally unfolding before me, as if the usual distance between myself and the action–imposed by cinematic artifice–has been obliterated. While the film’s stance may be cool detachment, and a refusal to judge its characters’ amoral goings-on, we feel we’re physically close, that Paris is bustling and unfolding right in our midst.

This naturalistic feel is achieved in spite of the stylized touches like Belmondo’s breaking of the fourth wall or all those jump cuts. In fact, it co-exists right alongside them, alongside the sheer movie-ness of it all, as Godard simultaneously revels in his chosen genre–the gangster flick–and playfully subverts it as well.

And that brings us–sort of sideways–back to the jump cuts. In his piece, Ebert tells us that they were largely accidental:

“The technique ‘was a little more accidental than political,’ writes the Australian critic Jonathan Dawson. The finished film was 30 minutes too long, and ‘rather than cut out whole scenes or sequences, Godard elected to trim within the scene, creating the jagged cutting style still so beloved of action filmmakers. Godard just went at the film with the scissors, cutting out anything he thought boring.’”

That may well be, but Godard was canny enough to do so where it counts most. As Ebert himself says, the jump cut “adds charm” to a scene in the stolen convertible, but it does more than that: it adds impetus, movement, flow. They are like short, choppy sentences in prose that indicate action. It’s no accident that they’ve become standard tools in the arsenals of action directors. But nobody uses them quite like Godard.

Was Breathless as revolutionary as everybody says ? Was it a turning-point like Citizen Kane or the advent of sound? Unless you were there, you kind of have to take everybody’s word for it. If you’ve watched or read about film at all, it is impossible to come to it as if it were 1960, to view it without pre-conceived notions. But it is possible to enjoy it for what it is–a sly, riotous piece of film making, and to appreciate the absolute joy and love of film with which it was made.