Breathless: Cinema's greatest accidental masterpiece?

Entry Number: 8

Film: Breathless

Year Of Release: 1960

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Rating: ?

*Warning: Major spoilers*

If you haven't, go watch this movie first, and then come back to this review.

"I don't think cinema influences youth. We should instead let youth influence cinema."

This is a quote said by Jean-Luc Godard under an interview, and I feel it explains the man perfectly. Godard was a French film critic for the magazine Cahiers Du Cinema, a notorious film magazine which denounced the work of classic revered French filmmakers and rooted for the work of new Hollywood directors like John Ford, Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock. In the late 1950's, Godard, Francois Truffaut and Alain Resnais all started working on their directorial debut films, all aiming to make a film that would break all possible cinematic rules. Truffaut released The 400 Blows in 1959, which ended with an infamous freeze frame that gave the viewer one of the most open-ended endings ever. Resnais also released Hirsohima Mon Amour in 1959, a complex work that examined memory through clever and confusing filmmaking. And while both made great film, none of them really broke so many rules. But then comes Godard with Breathless in 1960, one of the most radical, influential and important films ever produced.

I love the work of Godard. The guy was the most radical filmmaker that ever existed in my opinion, and I also consider him among the very best. My introduction to Godard was Vivre Sa Vie, his 1962 film starring Anna Karenina as a prostitute. I liked it very much, and I think even higher of it today. Wanting to check out more of Godard's work, I watched Breathless. Unlike Vivre Sa Vie, I thought it was dull and uninteresting. I appreciated it's infamous experimentation (which I will get into later in the review), but found it a forgettable experience, one that made me lose all interest in Godard. Some months later, I watched Pierrot Le Fou, and I was blown away. It's a film I will most defininitely review later in my life, but I'll just say that it ressurected my love for Godard. And that made me think that I might have been wrong about Breathless. I have been wanting to revisit it for a long time, and I finally did, and let me just say this: Oh boy, I was wrong!

Breathless follows Michel, a small time crook who desparately wants to be as cool as Humphrey Bogart. Michel is on the run from the police after stealing a car and killing an officer, something that makes his American girlfriend Patricia reevaluate their relationship.

On paper, there is basically nothing that makes Breathless stand out amongst the crowd. It's almost like someone who has never read an American crime book or seen a film noir read the Wikipedia article on film noir and tried to make one. And I'm not saying that I dislike the story, I actually find it very great, but it really almost seems like a parody of the film noir because of how strictly it follows the genre's cliches. The thing that makes Breathless stand-out is at the end of the day it's experimentation.

Breathless is most famous for it's editing, particularly it's groundbreaking use of jump cuts. According to Adobe, a jump cut is "an edit to a single, sequential shot that makes the action appear to leap forward in time", and "after the cut, the subject may appear in a different position or attitude, or the camera position may be slightly different". Jump cuts are often used to show time passing, but here, Godard just throws them in everywhere, making it seem like some scenes just leap forward 1 second in time for no reason at all. At the time, this was truly breaking the cinematic rules, and it really is increidbly experimental even today.

Of course, this isn't everything that makes Breathless experimental. We also have some of cinema's first fourth-wall breaks and some of cinema's first handheld cinematography. Breathless is also important for the history of film improvisation. Godard was obsessed with catching real spontaneous conversation, thus making his actors improvise their conversations. Sometimes, he would yell out lines while they were filming.

The small problem with Breathless is that there doesn't really seem like any reason for this ruthless experimentation. Unlike Truffaut's The 400 Blows and Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour which used their experimentation to help tell the story, Godard just seems to be experimenting for the sake of experimenting.

But let's ask ourselves this: Is he really experimenting for the sake of experimenting? Is there maybe a reason for the jump cuts, the fourth wall breaks and the improvisation? Is there maybe a reason for the cliche-heavy plotline? I am asking this because I believe that Breathless may be an attempt by Godard to capture France's identity crisis after World War 2.

Have you ever heard about the Blum-Byrnes Agreement? Basically, during World War 2, France was very concerned about their national identity. They wanted to perserve their unique image by all means possible, and one of the things that they did to perserve that image was to only show a limited number of American movies in cinemas. During this time, America was invading the whole world with their products, something that changed many countries around the world. After World War 2, France had a war-debt of 2 billion dollars, a sum of money that was just to expensive to pay. This caused prime minister Leon Blum to travel to Washington D.C. to sign an agreement with secretary of state James Byrnes, this agreement being that France would open their markets to American products so they didn't need to pay their debt. This sudden wave of American products were jarring for the people of France, and caused France to become half-French and half-American in it's culture.

Breathless reflects the state of France after World War 2 so well because it's a film that feels like it's lost. On one hand, we have a film that wants to be a love letter to the American films that inspired it. But on the other hand, we have a film that wants to break all cinematic rules through experimentation, especially the rules that we see in Hollywood filmmaking. This results in the film contradicting itself constantly. My favorite example is the scene where Michel shoots a police officer. The stand-off is one of the most iconic tropes of the film-noir, but Godard edits and shoots this scene in a way where the viewer gets no satisfaction. Breathless is lost, but so was France during that time.

There are few characters in film history that are as lost as Michel. He desparately wants to be someone else, that someone else being American icon Humphrey Bogart. And this want to be someone else probably comes out of how meaningless his existence is. He is a product of his surrondings, the surrondings being confused post-war France.

No scene is drenched in this nihilistic tone as much as the famous scene of Michel and Patricia in the apartment. We are told that Michel and Patricia are in love, and they may be, but I think they are not, at least not in the usual way. Both Michel and Patricia are lost, and therefore I think that their desire towards eachother isn't anything romantic, but them recognizing a lost part of themselves in their partner, and therefore their desire towards eachother is about regaining that lost part of themselves. Their conversations are made out of them staring into eachothers eyes, trying to see that lost part, trying to get it back.

And the film's experimentation only hightens the nihilism for me. Especially the jump cuts. The jump cuts feel pointless. There is absolutely no reason to cut away a few seconds from a scene. But that's the genius of the editing. The pointless editing adds an extra layer of meaningless into every scene.

The fact is that Breathless is a cynical film. Take the title as an example. The first thing that comes to mind when you hear the title "Breathless" is something romantic. You know, someone saying "You make me breathless" to their partner. But when you come to the end, you realize that it's probably a refrence to Michel collapsing on the ground after being shot, taking his last breath, now being completely "breathless".

But here's the strange part about Breathless: This depth may be accidental. Lately, there has been speculation that the jump cuts were a complete accident, and the reason for their existence was that Godard needed the film to be shorter, resulting in him taking out a few seconds out of every scene. The handheld cinematography may have been a result of a short budget, and the whole "Breathless is a reflection of France's identity crisis after WW2" may just be me overreading everything.

But that's what makes me come back to it so often. There's a great ambiguity surrounding Breathless for me. I always speculate why some choices are made, and often what Godard is even trying to say, if he is trying to say something at all. Breathless may be a deconstruction of the film-noir, France, or even just cinema as a whole. But this ambiguity is what makes me come back to Breathless.

And that ambiguity is what made others come back to it too. 

Breathless has become one of the most important and influential films ever. Film historians say that if it never was made, cinema would probably have taken a completely different direction. Not only was it the film that put the French New Wave into the spotlight, but without it, we wouldn't have a lot of our most beloved directors. The most notable example is Quentin Tarantino, who said that Godard was the reason for his iconic directional style. Tarantino called Godard the person who learned him the fun of breaking the rules. You know, maybe that's what Breathless is about? Breaking the rules. Let me direct you back to this quote:

"I don't think cinema influences youth. We should instead let youth influence cinema."

Rating: 9.9/10

Next Review: The Graduate