À bout de souffle

“… about a boy who thinks about death and a girl who doesn’t think about it…” Based on a true story taken from crime reports, Truffaut wrote a fifteen-page synopsis, which was developed into a screenplay by Godard, who, in his directorial debut, bid a radical farewell to narrative cinema. Being well familiar with the existentialism of Nicholas Ray, the romanticism of Roberto Rossellini and the documentary style of Jean Rouch (three acknowledged creative pillars), Godard made a film in which nothing happens and something gets added in only occasionally. ___ In Breathless, the storyline of a gangster B-movie (a mix of Gun Crazy and They Live by Night) is  peppered with a number of unwarranted digressions and pauses. The actual narrative happens only incidentally, when the empty chatter and playing around with form starts to be exhausting for the characters (at one point Godard himself comes in to set the stalled plot in motion). The story is thus not superior to all other elements as in standard narrative films – it has roughly the same importance as the editing, sound, cinematography and mise-en-scéne. These techniques in particular are used to characterise the protagonist, who otherwise shares scene very misleading information about himself. The shots are not always causally linked to each other, there are no logical connections between them (there is continuity in the scene post-synchronously recorded dialogue more often than in the images). Standard Hollywood-style continuity is broken. ___ Michel’s positioning and movement in a given shot also do not work together. In one shot he walks off to the left, in the next he stands in the middle of the shot, only to be turned to the right with his whole body in the next one. It is difficult to guess in advance where he will appear in a shot, which forces us to be more attentive and to constantly “refocus” our view. This is connected to the nature of the protagonist – he is unpredictable and makes decisions on the fly. Thanks to the quick, discontinuous editing (which stand in opposition to the atypically long circular camera movements) and focus on the action, Michel appears to be a man of action who gets straight to the point. He is constantly doing something, never standing still for a moment. Long speeches and idle waiting are strange to him. If he does not move another part of his body, he at least uses facial expressions. He lives in the moment. The seemingly sloppy and inconsistent editing emphasises his carefree nature. ___ However, the editing in Breathless is not only spontaneous (like the whole film), but also intentionally jarring and, together with the significantly variable length of the shots, contributes to the film’s disjointed rhythm. At the same time, the editing is not imperceptible, as André Bazin had wished, but alienating in a Brechtian manner – particularly after the use of a jump cut, we realise that something was left out. Another alienating aspect of the film comprises the actors’ looks directly into the camera, whether those of Michel during the opening car ride (as if he couldn't keep silent and therefore used the camera as his closest interlocutor) or of random passers-by in the “guerrilla-style” shots from the streets of Paris. It is difficult to speak of a particular style here. The main thing was to avoid copying the style of others and to break the existing narrative rules of film. In this sense, it is to a certain extent an aesthetic manifesto for the French New Wave as a whole. ___ Godard follows his own logic and comes up with his own language while deconstructing the language of genre films. Thanks to the neglect or absence of genre mechanisms, we paradoxically become aware of their importance. Whatever the director does not consider to be essential is left out of the story and the depiction of the characters. The fragmentation of the narrative makes it impossible to precisely reconstruct who did what and why. Emphasis is placed on the experience, not on the comprehensibility of the narrative. The disjointed and even muddled nature of the dialog corresponds to the lack of continuity in the images. When a sound is heard, there is no cut in its direction, and not every question is followed by the expected answer but, for example, by a sentence that is completely outside of the given context, which is why it is necessary to always be alert. ___ Compared to Godard’s later films, a major positive of Breathless is that you don’t have to analyse it shot by shot or be familiar with the director’s theoretical writings. You can simply enjoy Belmondo’s coolness, the cuteness of Seberg’s smile, and how fresh and original the film still seems after more than sixty years. 85% (2013-09-11) (less) (more)