Breathless: 50th Anniversary – Review

A new restored print of Breathless has been touring around various cities and art houses in honor of its 50th Anniversary.

Breathless or À bout de soufflé, literally “at breath’s end,” now in popular re-release with an amazing new print, is the first film of French filmmaker Jean-Luc Goddard. Along with Francois Truffaut’s 400 Blows and Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima, Mon Amour, the film met with critical acclaim and ushered in the nouvelle vague, or French New Wave. Truffaut, in fact, is credited with a screen-writing credit for coming up with the impressionistic scenario of a killer (and lover) on the run.

The action thriller has three main characters. The protagonist, Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo in his first role) is a loutish petty criminal who smokes, steals cars, and romances women. Oh, and he kills a cop for no apparent reason, much like Meursault (whose name is similar) in Camus’ L’Étranger, or The Stranger. He alternates between an uncaring thug and a charismatic clown. One memorable scene has him eluding police as he peeks furtively over the top of the newspaper comics. Michel’s American girlfriend Jean Seberg plays the budding feminist, who works at an international newspaper and near the film’s climax boasts of sleeping with numerous men. Petite, she sports a pixie haircut, but appears morally adrift. Paris plays the third character and never looked better. Goddard received no permissions to shoot the film there, but the Avenue des Champs-Élysées and other boulevards come alive, especially at night.

In Breathless, Goddard initiated the practice of “jump cuts,” an editing device in which two sequential shots of the same subject are taken from only slightly varying positions. Contemporary Scottish films seem to have mania for the device: Guy Ritchie’s Snatch and Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting successfully employed the technique. In addition, many later films–too numerous to mention–have alluded to this classic. The German thriller Run Lola Run employs the same pacing and also jump cuts. The Day of the Jackal intersects with a political event, in fact with the same Charles DeGaulle. And showing that life imitates art, the assassin Oswald sought refuge in a theater, much like Patricia evading the Paris police in their double-breasted suits. If you have a chance to catch this film, try: you will leave breathless.

Rating:

Steve Brock

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