Breathless (1960 film)

Breathless(French:À bout de souffle,lit.'Out of Breath') is a 1960 FrenchNew Wavecrimedrama filmwritten and directed byJean-Luc Godard. It starsJean-Paul Belmondoas a wandering criminal named Michel, andJean Sebergas his American girlfriend Patricia. The film was Godard's first feature-length work and represented Belmondo's breakthrough as an actor.
Breathlessis an influential example ofFrench New Wave(nouvelle vague) cinema.Along withFrançois Truffaut'sThe 400 BlowsandAlain Resnais'sHiroshima mon amour, both released a year earlier, it brought international attention to new styles of French filmmaking. At the time,Breathlessattracted much attention for its bold visual style, which included then unconventional use ofjump cuts.
Upon its initial release in France, the film attracted over two million viewers. It has since been consideredone of the best films ever made, repeatedly appearing inSight & Soundmagazine's decennial polls of filmmakers and critics on the subject. 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 ofHumphrey 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 theNew York Herald Tribuneon 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.
Breathlesswas loosely based on a newspaper article thatFrançois Truffautread inThe News in Briefabout Michel Portail and his American journalist 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 named Grimberg.Truffaut wrote a treatment withClaude Chabrol, but they disagreed on the story structure.
Godard was working as a press agent at20th Century Foxwhen he met producerGeorges de Beauregard. He helped Beauregard with the script forPêcheur d'Islande, but pitched him onBreathlessbecause he liked the treatment. Chabrol and Truffaut were now star directors. They were at theCannes Film Festivalin 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.
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."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."
Godard used screenwriterPaul Gégauff, who was known as a swaggering seducer of women, as inspiration for Michel's character.Fellow New Wave directorJacques Rivetteappears in a cameo as the dead body of a man hit by a car in the street.The film includes many in-jokes like the young woman sellingCahiers du Cinémaand Michel's occasional alias of Laszlo Kovacs, the name of Belmondo's character in Chabrol's 1959 filmWeb of Passion.
Jean-Paul Belmondowas not famous outside of France prior toBreathless. 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 toJean Sebergthrough his acquaintance with her husband Francois Moreuil.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.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'sLe Grand Escroc.
Godard wanted cinematographer Michel Latouche to shoot the film after working with him on his short films. Instead, De Beauregard hiredRaoul Coutard, who he had on contract.
The 1958 ethno-fictionMoi, un noirhas 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.
Godard envisagedBreathlessas a documentary and tasked cinematographerRaoul Coutardto shoot the entire film on ahand-held camerawith next to no lighting.In order to shoot under low-light levels, Coutard had to useIlford HP5film, which was not available asmotion picture film stockat 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 hepushedthe negative one stop from400 ASA to 800 ASA.
The size of the sprocket holes in the photographic film was different from that of motion picture film, and theEclair Cameflexcamera was the only camera that worked for the film used.Nearly the entire film had to be dubbed in post-production because the Cameflex was noisy and incapable of synchronized sound.
Filming ran 23 days from August 17 until September 12, 1959. It includedPresident Eisenhower's visit to Paris, which Godard used as a backdrop for the film.The crew met at Café Notre Dame and shot for two hours until Godard ran out of ideas. According to Coutard, the film was virtually improvised on the spot, and Godard wrote dialogue in an exercise book that no one was allowed to see.Godard gave lines to Belmondo and Seberg with only brief rehearsals before filming.
Locations were selected in advance, and assistant director Pierre Rissient described the shoot as very organized. However, filming was done without permits, adding to the spontaneous feel Godard wanted.Michel's death was filmed on the rue Campagne-Première in Paris.Actor Richard Balducci said shooting days could range from 15 minutes to 12 hours, depending on how many ideas Godard had. Producer Georges de Beauregard wrote a letter to the crew complaining about the erratic shooting schedule. Coutard claimed Beauregard got in a fistfight with Godard when he found the director at a café on a day when he had called in sick.
Godard shot the movie's first sequence toward the end, but most of the filming was chronological. There was minimal crew and no lights for the bedroom scene with Michel and Patricia at the Hôtel de Suède. Godard was determined to shoot there after living at the hotel in the early 1950s. Instead of renting adollywith complicated and time-consuming tracks to lay, Godard often pushed Coutard in a wheelchair.For certain street scenes, Coutard hid in a postal cart with a hole for the lens and packages piled on top of him.
Breathlesswas processed and edited at GTC Labs inJoinvillebyCécile Decugisand his assistant Lila Herman. Decugis said the film earned a pre-release reputation as the worst film of the year.
Pierre Rissient said that the jump cut style was not intended during the film's shooting or the initial stages of editing.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 ofjump cutshas been called innovative.Andrew Sarrisanalyzed it as existentially representing "the meaninglessness of the time interval between moral decisions."
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 fromFrance-Observateurin 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.
Breathlesswas on the cover ofCahiers du cinéma'sJanuary issue, months before its release.That same month, Godard was awarded thePrix Jean Vigofor his work on the film.Luc Moulletwrote, "Of all the films now being made by the newcomers to French cinema,À bout de souffleis not the best, sinceLes 400 coupshas a head start on it; it is not the most striking - we haveHiroshima mon amourfor that. But it is the most representative."By June of that year, it was already pointed to as "the crowning point of the new wave".
Bosley Crowthercalled 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".Archer Winstendeemed 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."
In a 1972 essay aboutBreathless,Oliver Stonezeroed 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 ofVadimorChabrol, these basic rhythms operate. With Godard, no such thing."
Richard Brodyenthused, "Breathlessopened...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."
The New York TimescriticA. O. Scottwrote in 2010, 50 years after the release ofBreathless, 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."Roger Ebertincluded it on his "Great Movies" list in 2003, writing that "No debut film sinceCitizen Kanein 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."
The film has a 95% score onRotten Tomatoes, based on 82 reviews. Its critical consensus states, "Breathlessrewrote the rules of cinema -- and more than 50 years after its arrival, Jean-Luc Godard's paradigm-shifting classic remains every bit as vital".
The Japanese filmmakerAkira Kurosawacited this movie as one of his 100 favorite films.
Oliver StoneinvokesFriedrich Nietzsche's metaphor of the "last man" during his analysis of Patricia. Stone paraphrasesThus Spoke Zarathustra, "What is pain? What is love? What is creation?...What is a star? What is anything anymore?"Stone concludes that such philosophical skepticism is a logical endpoint for a character like Patricia.
Hubert Dreyfussees 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.
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 ofFrédéric 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.In French,boucherefers to the human mouth, whilegueulemeans the wider mouth of an animal, e.g. dog, though commonly used for mouth and derogatory only in certain expressions, e.g. "ferme ta gueule" (shut your trap).
Subsequent releases of the film have differing translations:
Breathlessis shot through with constant in-jokes and references to other films:
Godard said the success ofBreathlesswas 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 makingBreathlessand blowing that all apart."In 1964, Godard described his and his colleagues' impact: "We barged into the cinema like cavemen into theVersaillesofLouis XV."
TheBritish Film Instituteincluded the film on several lists in itsSight and Soundmagazine:
TheBBChas also listedBreathless: