Illustration by Ciarán Butler. Originally published in print November 2020.
Despite playing with the tropes of Golden Age Hollywood, Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960) isn’t an action-packed film. It’s exhausting all the same. A study by NBC found that half of Americans’ sex lives worsened due to the pandemic and even as Tinder reported a 12% increase in engagement between March and June, many have found these romances to be a lot of talking, but not a lot of action. The lumpy communication and overstepping of boundaries it portrays feel so similar to the talking stage of dating. In the year it turns 60, I want to see what Breathless can offer in terms of consolation in a time where dating is restrained to two metre distancing.
Keeping connection from withering on the online vine can feel as detached as the drama of Breathless. Godard pushed the boundaries of cinematic tradition by pulling away at the point of action. As he recounts the story of small-time crook Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo) stealing a gun and shooting a policeman, Godard tugs what could be high-octane into something much more subtle. The extreme close up as the gun goes off denies the viewer any real sense of the character’s violence. As with meeting someone online, this enforced separation provokes a bravery that might not otherwise be invoked when faced with the much more visceral threat of rejection in person.
Like the back and forth that comes with dating online, the couple’s extended tête-à-tête is the film’s main source of tension. Having fled to Paris in pursuit of money, Michel tries to take his girl Patricia (Jean Seberg) away with him to Rome. Godard transports the viewer to being ten again and hoping that complimenting the peas your friend’s parents made will stop them bickering. Michel begs Patricia to leave with him and muscles his way into her flat. He smokes when she asks him not to and dismisses her attempts to make it as a journalist. Tucked up in our own beds, we get to see that if someone won’t respect your boundaries, then they probably aren’t for you.
Any gulf in values with a new person can be telling of what’s to come. The film’s experimental nature means the characters feel far removed from real people. But where Michel isn’t likeable, Patricia seems vapid. The female characters in the film are consistently vain, childlike and objectified. In this flatness, it’s hard not to interpret a level of veiled contempt for women on the part of Godard, particularly as the female characters of his films consistently double-cross the male protagonist. After asking if women will have a place in modern society, the man Patricia interviews dismisses her question by telling her that they will if they look cute like her. It’s difficult to discern how much of this depiction of gender is self-aware. This serves as an indication that it’s worth digging past initial assumptions.
As seemingly everything in our lives alters, it’s easy to feel desolate. Breathless, produced in a period that went through a similar pace of change, addresses this concern. Another journalist asks if Rilke was right to say modern life will increasingly separate men and women. Produced at the peak of the rigid and patriarchal society that the 1968 riots eventually reacted against, the film is an inevitable product of these attitudes. There is always an argument to be made that life is getting worse, but looking back we can see that life did improve for both genders. In the same way, in a period of surreal change, we can find hope that there is something better on the other side of it.
Watching the stilted acting and heavily accented French of Jean Seberg feels like noticing the food in your teeth only at the end of a date. As a forerunner to the Nouvelle Vague (the French cinematic movement that expanded what film can do), Breathless was playful in the way it pushed back against traditional techniques. The prolific jump cuts and fades to black were done for their cost-effectiveness, but combined with the hand-held shots and improvised lines leads to what can at times feel like the result of a home movie jolting about. Without this innovation, however, we might not have seen the same creative curiosity of directors like Andrea Arnold and Quentin Tarantino today. The most exciting things happen only on the edge of your comfort zone.
Awkwardness on a date can lead to an urge to perform a version of oneself, and Breathless explores what it means to take on an identity. Michel strokes his lips, mimicking Hollywood actor Humphrey Bogart. The film was produced 10 years after the ban on American films in France, and Godard, a consistently vocal critic of big production studios’ domination over what got made and their formulaic approach, wanted to explore these tropes. Variety called it the shards of an American action film. Michel is a knock-off version of a Hollywood movie star, which raises the question: if you take on the characteristics of a thing, do you then become it? Like Rene Magritte thirty years earlier claiming that representing a pipe does not make it a pipe, the film explores Sartre’s contemporary theory that what we do determines what we are. There’s consolation in the fact that everyone is in a constant state of performative becoming.
There is something to be gained even in what can be a struggle to communicate. In the final scene, Michel expresses his disgust at the situation, but when a policeman relays this to Patricia, it becomes an accusation that she is disgusting. This leads to her then mimicking the Humphrey Bogart lip trace—as with the separation of dating online, all meaning seems to be in flux. But where this can potentially lead to distress, it doesn’t always lead to loss. As Paula Marantz Cohen for The American Scholar notes, whilst the film’s title in the original French means something close to the last breath before death, the translated English title has a more superficial association of being overwhelmed by beauty. The room for more broad interpretation of the translation lends a subtle texture to the film not present in the morbidity of the French.
In its separation from reality, and beautifully framed shots, Breathless shows relationships for all their mucky grey lines. Without the way it plays with the formula of film, characters, editing and low-budget cameras, we might not have seen the same innovation in filmmaking today. Just as this iconic debut laid the ground for a whole legacy of film, struggling through dating online has the potential for cultivating a future of something more.
