Review: Godard’s Breathless Gets New and Improved Criterion Blu-ray Edition

This re-release luxuriates in the film’s fresh-as-ever cinematic pleasures while offering illuminating contexts through which to appreciate it anew.

BreathlessIt’s not surprising that Breathless remains fresh some 50 years after its Paris premiere in March 1960—if by “fresh” we mean somehow still in sync with contemporary cultural trends and mores. With its too-cool-for-school bevy of film and literary references, Jean-Luc Godard’s masterpiece both foresaw and helped to launch the now-dominant notion of pop-culture obsession as badge of honor. We may smile at Jean-Paul Belmondo’s rapt idolization of Bogart, for instance, but it’s more knowing grin than disconnected smirk. Then there’s the ooh-la-la chic of Raoul Cotard’s black-and-white cinematography; the simmering yet self-aware dance of seduction enacted with such arch grace by Belmondo and Jean Seberg; the casual fatalism that never seems to go out of style, especially when spoken in French and accompanied by swirls of cigarette smoke. As a source of modish pleasure, Breathless retains its appeal to a remarkable degree. You still want to be Jean-Paul Belmondo, or sleep with him, or both. You still want Jean Seberg’s New York Herald Tribune T-shirt.

It wasn’t until I sat down and re-watched Breathless—in a beautifully restored new 35mm print—that I remembered that its sleek surface charms, while hardly insubstantial, don’t really account for why we keep watching it so many decades later. Rather, what remains most striking, and most moving, about Breathless is its sophisticated yet largely guileless faith in the filmic medium, a cinephilia untainted by smugness or cynicism. Of course, such affection did not stop Godard from throwing out a slew of established filmmaking rules, from the continuity editing system to the notion that a film had to be inhabited by psychologically-consistent “characters” acting out a linear, cause-and-effect “plot.” But watching Breathless, one never gets the sense that Godard breaks these conventions out of anger or disgust—at least not yet. It comes from a place of jittery excitement and possibility, the double vision of appreciating so deeply the riches of cinema’s past and seeing so vividly what shape its future could take.

Don’t get me wrong: Godard remains as cool a customer as you remember. But even the sleekest of scenes can carry unexpected depth charges. Take the famous press conference set piece, where Seberg’s Patricia Franchini has been sent on assignment to interview famed author Parvulesco (the revered French director Jean-Pierre Melville). As reporters pepper the unflappable writer with queries on the nature of love and intimacy in contemporary society, Patricia keeps trying to get a word in edgewise, finally speaking up loudly enough to ask Parvulesco about his “greatest ambition.” After a pause, Parvulesco—what a great name, with all the vaguely European menace of a Sydney Greenstreet underworld kingpin—removes his sunglasses and answers famously, “To become immortal, and then die.” It’s a great line: gnomic and terse, emblematic of the film’s love of tough-guy nihilism.

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But what follows is even more interesting. Godard cuts back to a close-up of Seberg, who removes her own sunglasses and looks away puzzled. Martial Solal’s infectious score punctuates the shot, which lingers just long enough as Seberg slowly turns toward the camera in a look of meditative uncertainty. The scene ends with a delicious slow dissolve, her visage lingering in the frame as she gazes out enigmatically at the viewer like a grad student Mona Lisa. The point is not really to contemplate Parvulesco’s words along with Patricia, or even to really consider what Patricia thinks and feels about it herself. It’s about film’s ability to shape a stray moment seemingly devoid of content into an ambivalent and searching experience: how the close-up pulls us in and pushes us away simultaneously; how the dissolve makes us long for just one more second of contemplation. There’s hardly a moldier cliché in the movie lover’s handbook than to claim that a film is “about film itself,” but in moments like this, Godard foregrounds the medium without succumbing to empty flourish. He doesn’t weld style and substance so much as insist that style itself is a kind of substance, one that is suggestive and complex in its own right.

Certainly, this spirit animates Belmondo and Seberg’s performances. The actors don’t inhabit characters so much as occupy a middle ground where play-acting and fan ardor replace the embodiment of set emotions and personality traits. Patricia and Belmondo’s Michel Poiccard both do some pretty questionable things throughout Breathless (he steals a car and shoots a cop; she turns him in for personal expediency), but as Geoffrey O’Brien pointed out in a recent Film Comment essay, we don’t really think of these actions as revealing or even important to who Michel and Patricia really are. They are the acts of the hard-boiled loners and femme fatales from which Michel and Patricia—and, most importantly, Godard—find their animating spirit, and to recreate their world of violence and betrayal is more a matter of aesthetic fidelity than moral query. What’s remarkable is how compelling their performances end up being, grounded not in psychological complexity, but an appreciation for the complicated pleasures of inhabiting a fantasy cine-world. Watching that great extended duet between Belmondo and Seberg in Patricia’s apartment, it’s striking to what extent we come to know them and their relationship through the books they love, the gestures they appropriate, the music they dismiss and swoon over. I remember being so annoyed by this scene when I first viewed Breathless, because I falsely expected this to be a moment of traditional exploration between two characters. To babble on repeatedly about where to hang a poster seemed beyond irrelevant. But Godard knows that the repetitions, the asides, the quotes from Faulkner and Thomas, all form a language in their own right: a secret code of pop-culture references and digressions through which moments of genuine flirtatiousness and melancholy flicker through. Yet again, Godard’s skill is matched only by his prescience. It wasn’t until subsequent viewings that I not only grew to love the scene and its inhabitants, but made the now-obvious connection that this was not unlike how I and the people I know speak to one another today—just, you know, not as cool.

That Godard finally makes it out of that apartment and back onto the streets, though, proves crucial to why Breathless doesn’t asphyxiate in a cloud of cigarette smoke and self-absorption. The film may have cinema encoded in its DNA, but it is also very much a movie of the world, catching the glories of Paris on the fly via Godard and Cotard’s restless handheld camera. Watch the play of light and shadow as Belmondo and Seberg stroll from one side of a darkened building to another, or follow the syncopated rhythms of Godard’s jump cuts of Seberg’s profile as they drive through the city streets. These pleasures are, of course, uniquely tied to the cinematic apparatus that presents them. Still, it’s that most bounteous of movie gifts: moments that both gaze out into the world with wonder, and remind you that film’s ability to do so is wondrous as well.

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Godard’s attitude toward the outside world would become more complicated and explicitly political as time went by, just as the formal means by which he engaged this world would become more knotty and abstruse. In some ways, then, Breathless represents a simpler moment in Godard’s oeuvre. It certainly feels less self-reflexively critical in its embrace of cinema’s older politics of gender and power. Many have cast an uneasy eye on Godard’s framing of women throughout his career, and Breathless certainly carries with it the uneasy hint of unthinking misogyny. Godard recognizes how men objectify Patricia, but his camera does a certain amount of objectifying itself, as does a screenplay that ultimately paints her as a calculating backstabber. And yet, one must make room for her funny-sad ruminations in her apartment, and the way she feels so much like an equal to Belmondo as they cajole and annoy and eventually fall into bed with one another. There’s no pat way of characterizing the film’s attitude, particularly when Godard is drawing so explicitly from American genre movies that, let’s face it, had their own issues with the fairer sex.

In this way, Breathless feels very rooted in a specific time and place within the career of its creator, as he attempted to reconcile convergent and sometimes conflicting passions: old movies and new politics—the satisfying richness of classic Hollywood and the exuberant volatility of the French New Wave. We now know that he would figure it out splendidly—except when he wouldn’t. But in March 1960, everything was up for grabs save for the love and understanding of the medium that infuses every frame of Breathless. Such a blast of high-wire artistry can justifiably be deemed “fresh” by today’s standards. Watching it, however, you cannot help but reach for another overused yet occasionally perfect descriptor: timeless.

Image/Sound

Whether viewed on DVD or Blu-ray, Breathless looks simply divine. The interplay of natural light and shadow in Raoul Coutard’s cinematography retains both its electric immediacy and startling delicacy in this high-definition transfer, created using the 35mm original fine-grain master positive and personally approved by Coutard. The uncompressed monaural soundtrack, available only on the Blu-ray, has also been restored with a finely-tuned ear, cleaning up decades of aural wear and tear without sacrificing the on-the-fly miracles of ambient sound that Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Maumont caught while trawling the streets of Paris. The seductive, jittery glories of Martial Solal’s score have also never sounded better.

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Extras

Any film as canonical as Breathless is bound to have its fair share of reverential extras, and Criterion smartly leaves the genuflecting to individuals who can couch their praise in smart critical analysis. Jonathan Rosenbaum’s video essay, “Breathless as Criticism” offers some intelligent (if not always revelatory) connections between Godard’s critical practice and his filmmaking, tracing the cinematic and cultural influences that the director weaved into his first feature. An interview with D.A. Pennebaker sheds light on how Godard’s cinematic techniques interfaced with the innovations of direct cinema in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Dudley Andrews’s accompanying essay, meanwhile, provides some particularly incisive commentary on the influence of Roberto Rossellini, Nicolas Ray, and Jean Rouch on Godard’s early filmmaking.

Nevertheless, the most intriguing extras on this Criterion release treat Breathless less as an object to be appreciated (no matter how fresh both the film and the criticism might be) and more as a historically-specific event whose production and reception proved as unpredictable as Michel’s Paris sojourns. Transcripts of both Truffaut’s original treatment and Godard’s subsequent scenario offer a fascinating look at how the film (so famously composed of scenes whose dialogue was written the day-of shooting) developed on paper. Present-day interviews with Coutard and assistant director Pierre Rissient nicely balance affectionate remembrances with nuts-and-bolts shooting details, while “Chambre 12, Hôtel de Suede,” a 1993 documentary on the film’s production, features some lively conversations with Claude Chabrol, Belmondo, and others—although I could have lived without director Claude Ventura’s self-conscious “searching for Godard” framing. Perhaps most revealing, however, is the inclusion of one of Godard’s early shorts. A 1959 film featuring Belmondo and Anne Collette, Charlotte et Son Jules offers some enticing hints at what awaited one year later, particularly the emphasis upon Jean-Paul Belmondo as manipulative lover, while making one appreciate the astounding leaps in form, tone, and mischievous experimentation that Godard would make between this and his debut feature.

Finally, Criterion’s decision to devote some airtime to Jean Seberg and her contributions to the film’s success serves as a much-deserved riposte against the too-prevalent narrative that imagines Breathless as the triumph of an all-male triumvirate (Godard, Belmondo, Coutard), with Seberg staring somewhat uncomprehendingly off to the side. An archival interview with the actress underscores the pressures and perceptions that she fought against in the early 1960s, as she sought to rebuild her career in Paris after the financial and critical debacles that were her debut films, 1957’s Saint Joan and 1958’s Bonjour Tristesse. (Indeed, the uncomfortably personal questions that Seberg answers in her interview tellingly diverge from the more-laudatory professional queries directed at Godard, Belmondo, and Jean-Pierre Melville in the other archival interviews on the first disc.) Seberg’s struggles to forge a career in the face of these public tensions—a struggle that tragically ended with her suicide in 1979—form the heart of Mark Rappaport’s video essay, “Jean Seberg,” which eloquently highlights the actress’s unique talents and contributions to the iconic status that Breathless continues to have in cinephilic circles and popular culture at large.

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Overall

This excellent re-release luxuriates in the film’s fresh-as-ever cinematic pleasures while offering some illuminating contexts through which to appreciate it anew.

Score: 
 Cast: Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean Seberg, Daniel Boulanger, Henri-Jacques Huet, Roger Hanin, Van Doude, Jean-Pierre Melville  Director: Jean-Luc Godard  Screenwriter: Jean-Luc Godard  Distributor: The Criterion Collection  Running Time: 90 min  Rating: NR  Year: 1960  Release Date: February 25, 2014  Buy: Video

Matthew Connolly

Matt Connolly is an assistant professor of film studies in the Department of English at Minnesota State University, Mankato. His criticism has also appeared in Reverse Shot and Film Comment.

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