#34: Breathless

Breathless (Godard, 1960)


Breathless is a very style driven movie, and style driven movies tend to divide people based on how they feel about the aesthetic. The main plot of the movie is very simple. The main character is a crook, and at the beginning he has to kill a cop to keep from getting caught. He's being hunted, and he's trying to get enough money to escape. There's an American girl he likes and he's trying to convince her to run off to Rome with him. That's the plot, and the rest is style. The first time I watched Breathless I hated it, but watching it from the beginning having all the important themes in mind I appreciate it a little more. Besides that the 'main character is a huge douche' factor doesn't bother me as much as it did the first time, I can now appreciate how tightly knitted the plot is with the themes.

I can appreciate Breathless a lot. Because Breathless isn't a film you enjoy, it's a film you appreciate. You watch Breathless, then you write a fifty page paper dissecting it. Then other film theory students read your paper and write a sixty page paper about how wrong you are. Then you follow Jean Luc Godard to Santa Teresa, Mexico to meet him -- but I'm getting a little off track here. Breathless was the film that ignited the French New Wave movement in the 60s. It was the first to really use the 'shaky cam' and jump cuts. The thing is, it didn't need to use either of them, and they both come off as useless self indulgence.

The film has some other problems. It suffers from 'Don't tell me, show me' syndrome. There's this one scene where the American girl goes to this panel where a french poet explains that the way French women differ from American women is that 'French women haven't managed to control their men yet'. The main character constantly tells the American girl she's a coward. The idea of the film seems to be that the man honestly follows his animal impulses, whereas the American girl has the same impulses but doesn't act on them because she's afraid of giving up her independence, control, and personal ambition. Fine, those are good themes. But you shouldn't need to have all the characters say them to each others' faces constantly throughout the film to hammer them in.

Then there's the little weird issue that none of the characters have any moral problem with murder. She doesn't want to run away with him to Rome -- not because he's a murderer, or because he's a hostile misogynistic douchebag who only ever acts to satisfy his base impulses, but because she's afraid to give up her control. The point, as far as I can glean, is that the modern refusal to act on whim destroys the romantic paradigm. (I use the word 'paradigm' because that's the word you use to overanalyze things. Just ask Kuhn.) The ending, like many French New Wave movie endings, is driven by allegories for the director's agenda, which also comes off as self indulgence.

Nonetheless, Godard's a skillful enough director that even with the flaws, it's an enjoyable viewing. So this rating may seem higher than the writeup suggests.

Rating: *** 1/2 / 5

14/100

Next: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, All About Eve

Others:

Dead Ringers ** / 5

I have a friend who really likes Cronenberg. He keeps raving about him, so I keep seeing Cronenberg films. Dead Ringers has one big thing going for it, and it's that Jeremy Irons is incredible playing a pair of twins. But then the twins start going insane for no real reason, and none of any of the characters' behavior or actions seems plausible from start to finish. I just don't get Cronenberg.