Where to Begin? At the Beginning, of course. “A bout du soufflé”/“Breathless”
From the outset, Godard was taking apart cinema even as he was putting it together. Even the title of his first feature traffics in ambiguity and challenge. Sure, “breathless” is certainly on the point, but so is “out of breath”; “à bout” means to be at the end of one’s tether, add “du soufflé” and you have someone on their last legs, they’ve had it. Additionally, within moments, Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo) has told us he’s an asshole. And it just gets better from there.
Learning of the great master dying, my first thought was to start scheduling rewatches (and some new viewings; he was nothing if not prolific). To that end, starting with this shot over the bow just makes sense. I’ll probably go through the early work pretty quickly (they are glorious) and then pick through his later decades.
As others have noted, Godard grew didactic and far too pedantic in the seventies. There is still wit but the occasional satire, when it arrives, is pretty heavy-handed. There are, however, some wonderful “course corrections” (a term I hate because if anyone charted their own course, answering to no one else, for good or ill, it was Godard.) A more accurate way to put it is that we returned to Godard at opportune times (for us); Jean-Luc would continue on his way.
I watched Criterion’s 2010 (or was it 2007?) remaster and it is wonderful. I don’t know how long it’s been since I first saw “Breathless”. Maybe fifty years ago? I was a Bogart fan and I think that’s what drew me to the film, watching Belmondo rub his lip, call Jean Seberg “precious”, and sensed a kindred spirit with him as he intones “Bogie” while looking at a still photo of the man in a window at a repertory theater.
Of course, nine-tenths of the film went over my head. However, the playfulness, the hyperkinetic camera, the jumpy editing, even the enigmatic dialog resonated with me. When I saw it again in my late teens, at least then I knew I wasn’t getting it all but I still didn’t care; and every decade since, as the film and I age, we grow together. And it still remains a fun ride.
I had this version on DVD and then caught it on the big screen and frankly, I couldn’t get tired of it if I tried.
Honestly, if all you wanted to do is watch the film as a French version of “Gun Crazy” or any number of B-movies, you could do it. However, even that is somewhat woven into the semiotics of the film with its dedication to Monogram Pictures, paying homage to the studio that churned out the poverty row flicks that informed a substantial amount of the story here.
“Apres tout, je suis con.” After all, I’m an asshole.
Michel is a dick. Be assured, he is. But he’s also the restlessness of youth and whether intentional or not, of an entire generation that was getting tired of the world they saw, run by old men and sinking into apathy. Europe was still eight years (from the film’s release) from the May ‘68 revolution(s) but in Godard’s first movie, you sense the pump is being primed. The vitality in the work just as a plastic object to view is astounding, let alone the narrative (which is slight) and the layers that narrative enfolds (which are progressively demanding and challenging; if you walk away from the film without questions, you haven’t watched the movie.)
We ride with Michel as he sings to himself and ruminates on the virtues of Patricia, an American he had a brief affair with (Jean Seberg who should have had a far greater career). She says, later in the film, three days; Michel says five. By then, we’ve established that Michel’s sense of time and life may be quite different from many others.
Along the way, he breaks the fourth wall after telling us that he really likes France and adds, “if you don’t like the shore, if you don’t like the mountains, if you don’t like the city, then get stuffed!” Here the translation is possibly the first example of why Godard questioned language (“don’t translate, learn a language!”, he once told Daniel Cohn-Bendit). Yes, “va te faire foutre” is straightforward: “go fuck yourself.”
Of course, how his script would be translated into English was likely not on Godard’s mind, but I think he may have been amused (or simply resigned) at the bowdlerization of certain turns of phrase. In fact, it rather plays up his lifelong distrust and dislike of the United States in general, and rather feeds into another subtext of the film in terms of Franco-American relations.
If I recall correctly, it was Godard who said that all you need to shoot a film is a girl and a gun. Michel discovers a pistol in the glove compartment of the car he’s driving (boosted from someone; the auto’s original province isn’t clear) to sell to a guy in Paris. He play-shoots at people along the way over the steering wheel and because he is driving like an idiot, finds himself pursued by motorcycle cops.
He gives them the slip, turning off the highway and runs into engine trouble. He’s spotted by another cop, goes for the gun and shoots him. In the first of some wonderful editing, we see Belmondo running across an open field, all late fifties style in black pants and skinny(ish) tie, white shirt and shades.
Already, within the first few minutes of the film, we’ve encountered an amoral, rootless low-level gangster upgrading to cop killer and fleeing across a field in the French countryside. We have met him by sharing the front seat of the car with him and listening to his brio and bluster. We are also dimly aware that outside the frame, outside the text, more is going on. It is sensed more than stated but it’s there all the same and when the scene shifts to Michel calling on Minouche (Liliane Dreyfus) who is pretty pleased to see him and from whom he tries to cajole some money. She sees how it is and offers him the 500 francs in her purse which he declines (and then steals) while she’s dressing for work. He bids her adieu and heads out to track down money he’s owed and to find Patricia.
Along the way, he discovers he’s been identified as the murderer of a policeman and that a hunt is on for him, his picture in the paper and begins to track down a check made out to his alias Lazlo Kovacs which means he’ll have to sign it over to someone. The fellow who hands it off to him is another grifter (and a snitch, as we’ll find out in short order with two detectives trailing Michel inadvertently).
When he does track Patricia down, she’s hawking the New York City Tribune in the street and he badgers her to come to Rome with him. His persistence is both annoying and charming and Patricia puts up a series of defenses and tells him she’ll see him tomorrow. In the meantime, he goes, he begins following her and sees her on a date with a “nice guy”, a fellow American journalist. Belmondo shines as he watches the couple kiss in the guy’s convertible (has any leading man outside of Jim Carrey had such a rubbery face?) and when Patricia returns to his flat, Michel is waiting for her bed.
With the introduction of Michel’s photo it the paper and finding Patricia is an aspiring journalist who is going to attend the Sorbonne, there is a sense of how media enters our lives and proves a significant element in how those lives are lived. To be sure, Michel acted impulsively but out of spontaneity and while it is easy to assume he killed the cop in cold blood, there is a strong case to be made that it was in self-defense and out of fear (as Michel says later.) That said, through the news media, his life now takes on a more fraught dimension; the words, the images that are/are not him begin to impinge on his freedom and shape his will, his next move.
Patricia would like to join that cabal of reporting and editorialization; already, Godard is setting her up as the opposition which becomes explicit later. It is telling that she has a press conference to attend with a major film director (played by none other than Pierre Melville, another oh-so-meta element in a film and an oeuvre replete with them) and thus, could be read as the media interrogating the media (as this film itself is doing).
This second act in the boudoir is a tour de force of spontaneity and two actors holding a creative and deconstructive space. As much as Patricia tries to get Michel to be serious with her, he is by turns, childish, funny, provocative, and vulnerable. Patricia is the smarter but perhaps not much more than he. She may be more grounded, but you sense that she’s willing to go all in, but only for a moment. She knows something’s up with this guy, that he’s shady, but as she says, she needs to find out if she loves him. Oh, and by the way, she’s pregnant with his child.(1) This last is of surprisingly little concern to either of them (and for those who have seen “Happening”, we can suspect that is the case because Patricia probably has access to appropriate healthcare and we can assume that Michel “knows people.”)
Michel’s repeated attempts at seduction are playful and met with playful rebuffs; both reveal more and more of themselves to each other and Godard nails the revealing that reveals nothing. I wouldn’t say that each is stripping away masks only to reveal more masks, but that each feels not quite fully formed in their respective existences. “Am I not free because I’m unhappy or am I unhappy because I’m not free?”, asks Patricia, and in many other contexts, this might be a little too precious, knowing, or pretentious, but here, it is necessary. Neither she nor Michel can get at the root of their dissatisfaction with the world in which they are found.
The one avoids the confrontation with his existence by running blindly into it with little, if any care for consequences because, well, he’s had it. She, on the other hand, is doing the only thing that makes sense to her; attending the Sorbonne, her father paying for it (and sending her money that she augments with hawking papers and the odd assignment.) But neither is exactly taking a positive stance against (or even with) contingency or the milieux in which they find themselves separately or together.
They bandy words, rustle around under the covers, and fuck and get up the next day around noon so Patricia can attend the press conference and Michel can see if he can work his way out his jam by getting some cash.
To that end, he drives her to her destination and upon reading a paper with his mug in it, ditches in the backseat of the convertible he’s in. But not before he’s been spotted by a guy. A guy played by Jean-Luc Godard who, after Michel drives off, fingers him to a couple of cops as the lens irises in on them and the screen goes black.
Not enough can be said about the cinematography here. Raoul Coutard was stone genius (also another long-lived French master, he passed away at 92 in 2016). The filming of “Breathless” is the stuff of low-budget legend. Since they had no dolly, Godard wheeled Coutard around in a wheelchair; the idiosyncratic cutting within scenes was the result of Godard winnowing the film down to a releasable length; the night shooting was rigged by using film for still photography at night and threading it through the camera. Like the dialog, the troubleshooting resulted in glorious spontaneity and one of the most visually impressive film debuts since “Citizen Kane”.
I don’t know that there was a French director Coutard didn’t work with, but his work with Godard and Truffaut is enough to secure him a place in cinematography’s Valhalla. His visuals here could fit into a Sam Fuller movie with little or no disruption, but it’s his medium and wide compositions that lend the film an expansiveness beyond the closing-in of circumstances. It might be that Michel is doomed but this is countered by several set scenes that breathe despite that finality.
“Breathless” has been called nihilistic, and I suppose it is. Hubert Dreyfus connected the film with Nietzsche’s “active nihilism”(2), and while I don’t disagree, there is more to it than that, even. Godard loved his Hegel and his Marx and it is difficult to not see a dialectic at work throughout that builds increasingly to the very end.
To be sure, there is Michel juxtaposed against Patricia, the one embodying unrestrained urges, amorality, and for lack of better term, the wild. Patricia is more calculating/reasoned, and restrained. However, she is no less amoral and I don’t know if this is Godard’s intention, but her defining action at the denouement renders her suspect and possibly immoral, despite her reasoning. Perhaps even because of it.
Then, there is what could be deemed a kind of naive or simplistic politic; Michel is the young France in search of a genuine authenticity but still unwilling to meet its colonial present, its collaborationists (some of whom attained rehabilitation) with both the Germans and the contemporary capitalists of their parents’ generation. There was a lot that young people realized needed to be dismantled and it started from the ground up.
By the same token, Patricia bears the work of signifying much that those same young people both admired and loathed. U.S. pop culture had saturated the world by this point, but our engagement around the world “promoting” our version of democracy was militarist, colonialist, and demonstrably threatening to the stability of regions all around the globe. Similarly, when Michel says Americans are stupid, it is difficult to not want to agree. Patricia may very well love France; she speaks the language (not well, but better than I), she isn’t stupid exactly, but you sense that Godard is also juxtaposing her education against Michel’s wildness.
Godard doesn’t get as much into class here as he would later, but it’s not too difficult to see that it looms on the periphery. Patricia is, at least, in French terms at the time, an upper class bourgeoise. Maybe even an interloper; not a tourist, but one wonders which side she’d be on a few years later. Would she be politicized in her schooling in France or - as we might also suspect here, simply remain a bourgeoise. The very mention of the Sorbonne opens her up to critique of privilege and perhaps even a kind of mediocrity insofar as it would be “so typical” of an attractive American girl to attend such a prestigious school. Thus, Patricia might, for Godard and perhaps us, represent a kind of cultural appropriation or advantage taken because of capitalist clout and the ability that bestows to transition from the Anglophone to the Francophone (however haphazardly).
At the same time, it’s telling that as harshly as Michel speaks to her, there is something that transcends his adolescent outbursts; you sense that he does recognize in her a living being with her own agency. She doesn’t take his shit; she goes about her business; but she does seem to care about him, if not for him. There is a variable equality or egalité between them.
Before she attends the conference, she is interviewed and quietly threatened by a detective. She doesn’t deny knowing Michel, says he calls her and so on; and when she steps out into the daylight, she points out the cops to him across the street. She is also adept at losing them! It’s a fun sequence that isn’t without echoes of Sennett.
Once at the conference, her question about the director’s ambition is ignored the first time and the second time is met, after a long ogle and a pause, with a perhaps glib retort that his ambition is to be immortal and then die. By the time Patricia and Michel are back together in the evening, he has stolen another car, tried to fence it unsuccessfully (why should the fence pay anything to a guy the cops are about to nab) and meets up with his buddy to figure out where to lie low. Tellingly, the buddy mentions Minouche whom we met earlier and Michel dismisses Patricia’s question about “minouche” (meaning something along the lines of “simply lovely” or “simple and lovely”). Indeed, we find that closer to the end of the film, Patricia is asking about the meaning of words more and more.
To be sure, she is among younger people throwing around slang, but that’s not it alone; we frequently don’t ask about the meaning of words and this is worse when we are faced with situations where meaning is required to navigate them. The word is the signifier of what is outside the lens and text and this is something that Godard would come to explore later, but again, as with so much, its seeded here, as well.
Patricia and Michel find a place to hole up and they have a kind of condensed version of their previous dialog. Michel is showing signs of fatigue that he had stated explicitly previously and Patricia returns to averring that she had to see him again to tell if she really cared for him. We aren’t getting Bonny or Clyde here. We have two people whose relationship is dissolving owing to a small cluster of reasons but which reasons are drawn from without, from circumstance, from contingency.
Both of them are facing their respective fates but they remain open fates, open-ended, inconclusive. Of course, this is a movie; it will conclude.
When Patricia goes out to a nearby store, she calls the detective who gave her his business card and returns to tell Michel she had done so, in order to get him to go, to leave. It may have been done with a good motivation, but it is in some ways, immoral in the sense of turning someone in; of being a snitch. I don’t think it’s dishonest to use that here. Patricia may not have committed to a life of crime or following Michel’s lead, but there was by this point, a kind of understanding between them that is betrayed here.
There is also the immorality of Michel gunning down a policeman who for all we know, may have had a family, been well-loved, and so on. (Or may have been a corrupt bastard on the take who beat his wife and kids.) This may also be contextualized that the system that produced a Michel is rotten already as it is; additionally, it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to see the cop as representative of the Gaullist state that needs to be taken down anyway.
This latter interpretation returns us to Patricia as the bourgeoise who is simply “doing what’s right” according to her nominal conventions. Thus, her informing becomes a reversion to aligning herself with the values of the conformist, the middle class, the complacent. This is a harsher read than I want to accept, but it is Godard and I can’t dismiss it out of hand.
Michel’s eventual demise being gunned down as he picks up a discarded gun (and tosses it before fleeing) harks back to the end of “Little Caesar” (among others, but there are so many homages in this film, it would take me even more time to get this all down). In the interim, we have come to know Michel well and with Patricia, developed a kind of fondness for him. (2)
As he lies on the sidewalk dying (and smoking; it is a genuinely humorous image), surrounded by cops and Patricia, he says (in the 2010 translation): “Makes me want to puke.” Patricia asks what he said and one of the cops replies, “he said you make him want to puke” to which she asks,”what’s that mean, ‘puke’?” (3)
Even at the last, language is the ultimate betrayal both in the original (and naturally, in translation). Michel said, “C’est vraiment dégueulasse.” Basically, “it’s disgusting.” After Patricia asks what he said, the cop replies, “Il a dit que vous êtes vraiment ‘une dégueulasse’.” “He said that you are a disgusting thing” (this is so literal…ugh.) The point is that even in the source language the meaning is lost in translation and perhaps even intention. Did the cop misunderstand Michel? Or did he mean to obfuscate what Michel said? Or is it simply that there are untranslatable words? Or are all words, at best, merely indicators of the thing spoken. I don’t know how Sausserian Godard was, but knowing his work a little bit, I think a persuasive case could be made that he might have thought that what is spoken begins with the sound organized by the brain into signs that, at best, indicate thoughts, ideas, etc. Communication - true communication - may not be truly possible. Or possibly, there is no true communication. Or again, from Nietzsche, that there are many truths and consequently, there is no truth.
The final shot as the camera closes in on Seberg’s face is riveting. It is implacable, though I’d not say unemotional. I don’t know that Patricia has started processing yet this chapter of her life. Will it be reduced to an episode that she glosses over with friends or an anecdote that she entertains people with? Or will its impact deepen over time and give rise to profound reflection and perhaps galvanize her into pursuing something great? Has it or will it open her up to something inside her or reveal that, at twenty years old, there is nothing - or not much - there, yet? Or are we merely seeing a character as a textual symbol? (4)
I don’t believe we can exhaust a masterpiece. Over sixty years later, Á Bout du Soufflé” is still asking us to question the film itself, to look at cinema as reflection and a sequence of funhouse mirrors. Godard practically demands that we take what we’ve experienced into the world and use it.
It might be that the film is a study in “active nihilism” but it is also part of a lifetime project to interrogate the world(s) we inhabit and to locate the self somewhere in those worlds. Like “Kane”, we come back to a towering work that on the surface is a fun romp, a trifle. But it disturbs us. We sense that there is more. Why do these two people hang out in a bedroom blabbing when one of them is a murderer and a crook? What do they have in common and if nothing or something or a little bit or a lot, why do we care? These are simplistic, superficial concerns but the viewers who hold them, if they have any sensitivity, will be disturbed by these questions and start to look a little deeper. Like Patricia, they may start asking what the words mean and what the images do.
Godard was no nihilist; but he knew the value of nihilism as well as its pitfalls. Taking this all in as a filmic essay of values/folies/open-ended narrative structures and recognizing all this is in a feature debut (let alone writing about it), can you leave you out of breath.
Notes:
Her Patricia is the great enigma of the movie. Michel we can more or less read at sight: He postures as a gangster, maintains a cool facade, is frightened underneath. His persona is a performance that functions to conceal his desperation. But what about Patricia? Somehow it is never as important as it should be that she thinks she is pregnant, and that Michel is the father. She receives startling items of information about Michel (that he is a killer, that he is married, that he has more than one name) with such apparent detachment that we study that perfectly molded gamin face and wonder what she can possibly be thinking. Even her betrayal of him turns out to be not about Michel, and not about right and wrong, but only a test she sets for herself to determine if she loves him or not. It is remarkable that the reviews of this movie do not describe her as a monster--more evil, because she's less deluded, than Michel. (Ebert, 2003)
I can’t quite see Patricia as a monster and certainly not because she’s “less deluded”. As I’ve mentioned already, she is a privileged American who (probably) has access to the procedure regardless. I also do not find Seberg’s performance of Patricia difficult to read: she has layers, yes (it is a stellar turn), but she is as amoral as Michel in her own way and much of that is simply the callow nature of youth (more so in her case than his).
More to the point and more defining is that she doesn’t seem fazed at all by Michel’s situation. That and her eventual betrayal tell us that she lives life at a remove. Patricia as a character just isn’t that deep a human being to care more. She questions her lack of freedom and that her unhappiness may be related, but it’s here that Michel comes in handy, puncturing a lot of her self-involvement (he’s still an asshole, but even assholes can be on the money.) The other issue is that I’m not really sure how much Godard is invested in the character himself; she works better as a stand-in for Americans in general, as a signifier of if not a symbol for, American arrogance, and the way our place in the world in the late fifties/early sixties gave us a sense that nothing ill could harm us and whatever dire straits others found themselves in, well that was their problem.
It may be that Patricia did at some level care about Michel, but even her ratting him out was intended to get him to get up and go, another very American attitude. Of course, it backfired as it would. Michel let Patricia (and us) know that he was fed up. Tired and fed up.
Obviously, I’m having a difficult time describing Michel or Patricia as monsters. I don’t necessarily human beings in that regard anyway, and once again, I am not ignoring the heinous nature of Michel’s action (as well as his constant grift and assault). It’s just that I sense Godard is already asking us at this early a stage in his career to assess the situation and not be so quick to affix meanings that may not fit or be aware that the meanings of words and what we observe shift and change over time. Even within the hour and a half length of a film.
2. Dreyfus, 2012.
3. I wonder if Anglophone viewers would be as fond of Michel if they knew how coarse his language really is. Telling someone to fuck themselves is a bit different from telling them to get stuffed; and there are other similar turns of phrase in the movie the edges of which are blunted in the sub-titles. That said, Michel’s charm emanates from Belmondo’s performance and Michel does remind me of a lot of charming fuckers I’ve known in my time; hustlers, thieves, and drunks and addicts and all of them smarter than they let on, but like Michel, driven to burn out as opposed to fading away.
Ella Shohat and Robert Stam note (Shohat and Stam in Shohat, p. 120, 2006):
More significant is the tendency, with New Wave films, to bowdlerise the French dialogue. (Censorship, for Freud, we are reminded, was a kind of ‘translation’.) The English subtitles of Breathless, for example, consistently play down the aggressive grossièreté of the original. Belmondo’s ‘Je suis con’ becomes an inoffensive ‘I am stupid’ [note: in earlier releases of the film] and his ‘Va te faire foutre!’ addressed directly to the camera/audience, is rendered by a desexualised ‘Go hang yourself!’ The tendency to shy away from sexually connoted words reflects, perhaps, a higher coefficient of puritanism within a society, or at least among its translators. Repressive regimes…have exploited subtitling and dubbing as a mechanism of censorship.
4. Paula Marantz Cohen approaches the film from the perspective of a text (and I find a number of her points compelling). For example (Cohen, 2009):
…[I]ndeed, like a difficult theoretical text, Breathless seems to demand interpretation. In its aimless, uninflected characters and meandering plot we can postulate, for example, a Sartrean conception of existence without essence. In this reading the characters hotly became symbols but also statements about the absurdity of life without a political-philosophical commitment. This reading has the advantage of making the film conform to any political ends that the filmmaker or its audience may champion. Thus a seemingly unfocused, amoral film can be transformed, through interpretation, into an aggressively moral or political one.
Bibliography:
Cohen, Paula Marantz. The Potency of "Breathless": At 50, Godard's film still asks how something this bad can be so good. The American Scholar, Vol. 78, No. 2 (SPRING 2009), pp. 110-114 Published by: The Phi Beta Kappa Society. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41222028.
Dreyfus, Hubert. “Professor Dreyfus lecture - Breathless (A bout de soufflé). Active and Passive Nihilism.” YouTube. 17 June 2012. https://youtu.be/th52fhMlsDA.
Ebert, Robert. “Breathless”. rogerebert.com. July 20, 2003.
Shohat, Ella (with Stam, Robert). “The Cinema after Babel: Language, Difference, Power” in Taboo Movies, Diasporic Voices. Next Wave: New Directions in Women’s Studies. Duke University Press. Durham, North Carolina. 2006
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