Film Critique

"After all, I'm no good," broods Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo) in the opening moment of Jean-Luc Godard's brilliant 1960 work "Breathless." \nA fedora droops down over Michel's intense eyes after he utters this, while smoke wafts out of his cigarette in giant, fluid chunks. Then he does his trademark lip-wiping with his right thumb. He has a virtue after all -- he is passionate, passionate about the cool of America's cinematic gangster. And as much as Godard's first and still greatest work pays homage to Hollywood cinema, it also mocks and reinvents every movie convention, thus making "Breathless" one of the most important films in the French new wave's and in film history. \nThe story, originally conceived by one of Godard's new wave pals Francois Truffaut and adapted by Godard, fits into the basic gangster love-on-the-run genre, but has a twist: It is fully aware that the movie is a movie. Michel emulates the Hollywood gangster recklessness by stealing cars, shooting a police officer and chasing after and falling in love with the wrong woman, Patricia (Jean Seberg). But he is sloppy in the process. He often looks like a fool -- his lip-wiping is achingly self-conscious, he does a horrible job of disguising himself when his picture is featured in every newspaper, and he is not smooth enough to keep his feelings to himself.\nJean-Paul Belmondo is utter perfection, with his Michel melding Bogart, Cagney and Dean all into one. Yet Seberg somehow acts his equal, giving Patricia unforgettable femme fatale spunk. But the acting is seemingly secondary to Godard's script, which integrates lines verbatim from B-grade potboilers and calls attention to the cinematic medium. One moment features Belmondo's Michel speaking directly to the camera while during the movie's most famous sequence in Patricia's apartment, Seberg stands right next to a poster of herself. \nIn this sequence and throughout "Breathless," dialogue flows out in a stream-of-consciousness manner, with most comments like "I smoke Luckies now" having nothing to do with previous ones and the furthering of the overall plot. This breaks the mold of conventional celluloid film narrative forever, paving the way for cinema worldwide to further explore the possibilities of the art form.\nBeyond breaking narrative standards, "Breathless" is the ultimate example of phenomenal independent filmmaking. The movie is far detached from studio sets. Working with a small budget, Godard and cinematographer Raoul Coutard, who later frequently worked with Truffaut, shot the film entirely on location in Paris and surrounding areas. Godard also tosses the standards of camera work out the window. Rather than resorting to stagnant cinematography, countless handheld camera scenes complement "Breathless's" genuine scenery, with some sequences actually shot in a wheelchair that was pushed around Paris. A striking highway scene from the perspective of the hood of one of Michel's stolen cars and a gorgeous long shot of Michel dashing across an open field also fuel the visual breadth.\nThe annals of cinema history will most remember "Breathless" for its most vital sight-based attributes: its editing. Jump cuts are featured throughout, including one scene in which Patricia is talking with a man where Godard makes two edits per line of dialogue. Pure editing bravado also occurs when Michel kills a police officer, with the film cutting from a shot of Michel to his gun to the officer falling into shrubbery after being wounded. The great irony of the film's often rhythmic editing is that much of it was done not for purely artistic purposes but out of necessity to cut the movie down from its original three-plus hour running time to 90 minutes. No matter what the case though, "Breathless" represents one of cinema's finest examples of editing technique.\nThen there is the sound of "Breathless." Many of the movie's aural ingredients were directly captured on film. Some occurred at unexpected instances, such as the sound of two police cars that squeal past\nA scene in Patricia's apartment commits the ultimate Hollywood no-no: overlapping of dialogue. The rest of the soundtrack salutes gangster pictures in a tongue-in-cheek manner. Gunshot sound effects pop about when Michel playfully points the gun at the sun. And Martial Solal's score is the ultimate send-up of the run-of-the-mill melodramatic mobster music, with gruff, hard-edged melodies mixed in with absurdly over-the-top romantic themes.\nGodard, along with fellow New Wave directors Truffaut, Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer, first got started in the film world by writing critiques for the French magazine Cahiers du Cinema. His colleagues and he espoused the auteur theory throughout their critical days that were spent raving about the hidden meanings imbedded in the works of Sam Fuller, Nicolas Ray and other obscure and underrated American filmmakers. Godard learned a great deal from his own preachings, authoring a work in "Breathless" that knows no limitations but those of the film stock itself.\nUnfortunately, "Breathless" fulfills its own prophecy. One character states that his ambition is "to become immortal and then die." Like Michel, whose crime put him in the ultimate record of the time period the newspaper, "Breathless" itself became immortal once it was released by being recognized the world over for challenging the rules of film. And just as Michel dies in the end, the new wave and all the promise it brought with it died off and has left a small imprint in the medium overall. But like Patricia, who is left "breathless" at the film's end, the modern viewer still gasps for air when "FIN" fills the screen.