| Collector's Corner November 2007
 À
bout de souffle (Breathless)
- Starring: Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean Seberg,
Daniel Boulanger, Jean-Pierre Melville
- Directed by: Jean-Luc Godard
- Theatrical release: 1960
- DVD release: 2007
- Video: 1.37:1 (fullscreen, original aspect
ratio)
- Sound: Dolby Digital 1.0
- Released by: The Criterion Collection
All art forms undergo the occasional sea change, and it
usually happens when avant-garde artists become sick of the constrictive formulas
of the garde arrière: "The old-timers have become fat and complacent. They
don’t understand reality. We need to show the truth." Often, the new art comes
as a youthful nose-thumbing in the direction of the old, as the young try to be as
shocking as possible. Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe, with its nude
woman at a picnic accompanied by two fully clothed men; Mascagni’s Cavallaria
rusticana ushering in the verisimo movement in opera; Theodore Dreiser’s Sister
Carrie showing the grind of life in the poor side of Chicago; punk rockers
screaming invectives at prog-rockers. Each art form has its own long list.
But milestone movies brandishing a middle-finger salute to
the old-timers have happened only a few times, and more often in Europe than the US. D.W.
Griffith’s Intolerance and Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane are the
main American films that fit the profile.
But post-WWII Europe, its youth disillusioned by war and
its aftermath, was a hotbed of bilious rebellion. Much of it was stoked by the young film
critics who wrote for the French magazine Cahiers du Cinéma (Notebooks of Cinema),
six of whom would go on to be influential directors themselves: Jean-Luc Godard, François
Truffaut, Louis Malle, Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, and Claude Chabrol. They constituted
the French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague), whose stated goal was to demolish the "cinéma
de papa."
Godard wasn’t the first Cahiers du Cinéma
writer to make a great movie, but his first feature, À bout de souffle (1960;
released in the US in 1961 as Breathless), changed cinema for all time. It’s
the story of Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a young sociopath who casually murders
a policeman. The police start looking for him. A hood owes Michel some money, and he tries
to collect and get his American girlfriend, Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg), to escape
with him to Italy. The story is almost incidental to the filming and character study.
Godard, working from a story by Truffaut, would write the dialogue immediately before
filming, to keep the actors guessing.
The concept was to create a new way of looking at
people’s lives: Real people. Gritty people. The decision to make the protagonist a
sociopath fit Godard’s view of life. He had created trouble himself -- he was a
habitual petty thief, an occasional homosexual prostitute, and a onetime resident of a
psychiatric hospital. But he also believed that cinema could change the world on a
metaphysical level, and he set out to prove it in Breathless.
Godard saw a world of cinema that had gone stale. Silly or
bloated films such as Around the World in 80 Days and Ben-Hur were winning
the Oscars. Godard thought people should instead be paying attention to the stark,
unsentimental works of directors such as Nicholas Ray and Billy Wilder, and the low-rent
gangster flicks from Monogram Pictures. Godard held so strongly to his view of cinema that
he made his first film look like a documentary, following his characters into everything
but their bathrooms.
 His choices of actors made its own
statement. Belmondo was pug ugly, with a boxer’s face, and the constant cigarette in
his mouth forced him to squint and mug for the camera. Jean Seberg was gorgeous, but
tainted property. In 1957, with no acting experience, she had been cast as the lead in her
very first film, a big American spectacular titled Saint Joan. When that film
failed, she was the scapegoat.
Godard had this beautiful American fall in love with the
gangly Frenchman, but instead of love leading to salvation, the theme of most films of the
day, in Breathless love leads to ennui, torpor, and murder. The concept alone
scared the hell out of most of the critics of the day.
Godard wasn’t content to stop there. When the film
grew too long, he created jump cuts by snipping out lengths of footage, sometimes right in
the middle of a scene. Today you see this technique used everywhere, especially in the
works of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez. Then, because he wanted to shoot scenes
quickly, Godard did away with laborious setups and dollies, and instead used handheld
cameras. When he needed a dolly effect, rather than install tracks, he simply put the
cameraman in a wheelchair and pushed him along. These shaky effects are now seen in almost
any TV show you watch, mostly to add tension. Both jump cuts and handheld cameras are so
common today that we barely notice them, but in 1960, it was as horrifying to the old
guard as watching a dog and cat have sex.
Godard ended up being the poster child for all that was new
and exciting about film, and has spent the rest of his life trying to live up to the
moniker. Whether espousing communism (Tout va bien, 1972), revising film history (Histoires
du cinéma, 1988), or trying to shake up stale paradigms (Alphaville, 1965),
Godard has remained constant in his belief that cinema can change the world.
A film this significant deserves the full Criterion
Collection treatment, and they turn in one of their best efforts. The booklet alone is
worth the price of admission, with a topnotch essay by Dudley Andrew, an interview with
Godard from Cahiers du Cinéma, and Godard’s written description of the film.
There are archival video interviews with the actors and director, and an entire second
disc of interviews, essays, and an 80-minute "making of" feature. The Criterion
Collection achieves a spellbinding clarity in both the sound and the vision of the film.
Given the cheapness of the original production, this restoration is a work of art in
itself.
Today, film critics rank À bout de souffle with
Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane as the greatest first film by any director. And À
bout de souffle is not just a stale film for history buffs. It remains disturbing and
powerful, and its continuing influence on film students shows up again and again, whether
in the story of a couple on the lam trying to escape to paradise, of a killing spree gone
bad, or in docudrama-like camerawork. From Bonnie and Clyde up through TV’s CSI
franchise, Godard’s influence is everywhere.
But this is where it all started, and where everything
changed. If you have the least interest in film, get a copy, sit down, and watch it. And
each time you think you see a hackneyed cinematic or plot device, remember: Godard did it
first, and he did it here.
...Wes Marshall
wesm@hometheatersound.com |
