110 - Breathless, 1960, France. Dir. Jean-Luc Godard.

Thursday, April 20, 2017

110 - Breathless, 1960, France. Dir. Jean-Luc Godard.

And here we are.

Story by Francois Truffaut.

Technical Advisor Claude Chabrol.

Cinematography by Raoul Coutard.

Directed by Jean-Luc Godard.

Starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg.

With appearances by Jean-Pierre Melville and Godard.

Jump cuts.  Hand-held camera work.  A jazz score.  Fashion.

Frenetic, kinetic energy interwoven with lackadaisical leisure.

And that alias, Laszlo Kovacs.

This film was the watershed.

The change from one era to another.

It was Jean-Luc Godard's first film.

He was 29 years old.

How many great directors directed one of the great films their first time out?

Orson Welles, Citizen Kane, 1941
John Huston, The Maltese Falcon, 1941
Nicholas Ray, They Live By Night, 1948
Charles Laughton, The Night of the Hunter, 1955

There are others.  But Godard stands in a small class.  The vast majority of directors, even the greatest ones, began by directing a film that is now forgotten, or one that is now appreciated as a decent first step.

In a few days we will see if Godard's colleague/friend/adversary Francois Truffaut stands in that small class with him.

One of the ways to gauge a film's impact on the culture is to see if it has that same impact on future generations who were not yet born when the film was made.

I saw Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction when I was in university, and I could hardly leave the theater.  I felt as if I had been confronted with something I had never seen before.  I was smashed in the brain.

Breathless had a similar effect on me.  And I saw it more than three decades after it had had that effect on its own generation.

I watched it yesterday to write this article,  And it smashed me again.

I have a larger-than-life yellow landscape-oriented poster of Breathless on the wall of my Studio 1.  Not far from Casablanca, It's a Wonderful Life, Singin' in the Rain, Giant, and Gone with the Wind.

Do not read too much into that.  I have many movie posters hanging everywhere.  But those are the large ones that happen to be in that section of the Studio.  All of my students sit in those classes under that poster.  And have for seven years.

When my nine-year-old entered the Studio yesterday, I was in the middle of the movie.  He took one look at Jean Seberg with her boyish hair and her t-shirt and asked in a split second, "Is that Breathless?"

Yes.

That is Breathless.

Jean Seberg with her boyish hair and her New York Herald Tribune t-shirt.  Or her sailor-striped shirt and skirt.  Her pin-striped shirt.  Her striped dress with white cardigan and heels.  Her solid dress.  Her sunglasses.  His hat.  His sunglasses.

It is a movie that can have that effect on you.  It can take your breath away.  Not in its beauty or truth or goodness or romanticism or writing, but in its differentness.  Its strange style.  The mysterious way in which it somehow magically hit the sweet spot, maybe to some degree in spite of Godard, and feels so inexplicably just right.

I say "in spite of," because we know he did not plan the jump cuts.  And they make the movie--among other things.  They were an afterthought.  Done for practical purposes.  Not Godard's idea but Jean-Pierre Melville's.  Yet we give him credit.  Godard's spirit still pervades it.

Breathless is a punch in the face.  And you do not mind being punched.  It wakes you up.  Makes you feel as though you have been sleepwalking.  Makes you want to go out and do something with yourself.  With your life.  Makes you want to live.

Which is ironic in light of the story line.  It is not that you want to steal a car or shoot a police officer or live life on the run.  But that you want life to be alive.

Some movies made people want to be actors and live the life they have seen on the screen.

This movie made people want to be directors and put the life they imagine on the screen.

Michel Poiccard stands in a Paris parking lot.  Reading a newspaper.  Watching the cars.

He is played by Jean-Paul Belmondo.  We have seen him in Leon Morin, Priest (1961) and Le Doulos (1963), and we will see him again.

Michel has a girl helping him as a lookout.  When the circumstances are right, he selects a car and steals it.  She wants to go with him.  He tells her to get lost.

He drives out in the country.  He sees two girls hitchhiking.  He slows to pick them up.  He decides they are not pretty enough and keeps driving.

He passes vehicles.  He speeds.  Two cops on bikes see him.  They chase.  He pulls off the road onto a dirt road in the trees.  Pops the hood.  Checks his distributor wire.  One of the cops finds him.  He finds a gun in the glove box of the car he just stole.

Boom!

We see a close-up of the gun.  We see a hand holding the gun pointing one direction.  We see what might be the cop falling down in the woods.  We see Michel running across a field.

The physics do not work, and it will be that way throughout the film.  The gun points one way.  The cop falls another.  The cop is standing in a different spot than the one where we just saw him.  We do not even know if it is the same actor or stunt double.

In filmmaking there is something called continuity.  Things need to match.  They need to make sense.  The Script Supervisor is responsible for checking.  The department heads and their on-set representatives also check.  When movies get it wrong, fans find it and point it out.  IMDb has a section called Goofs.

With this movie it just does not matter.  We jump in time, from a few seconds later to a few minutes later.  And yet we can follow it.

Michel arrives in town.

He helps himself into the apartment of a girl he knows.  She is getting ready for work.  He flirts with her.  She resists his advances but is willing to hang out with him.  Willing to get dressed as he hangs out.  He takes her money when she is not looking.

He goes out onto the street.  Where Patricia, the American with the Italian name, is selling newspapers.  The New York Herald Tribune.

He asks her to come with him to Rome.  He is on the run, remember?  She says No.

They will spend the movie spending time together, as well as some time apart, sometimes doing nothing.  There is a long scene in the middle of the movie where she comes home to find him in her bed, and they sit around and talk for quite awhile.

They are young.  They are trying to decide what they want in life.

Michel Poiccard will go under the name Laszlo Kovacs.

It just so happens that Laszlo Kovacs is also the name of a Hungarian-turned-American cinematographer.  Just as Jean-Luc Godard was a founder of the French New Wave, so also was Laszlo Kovacs a founder of the American New Wave.

The latter Laszlo shot Easy Rider (1969), Five Easy Pieces (1970), What's Up, Doc? (1972), Paper Moon (1973), Shampoo (1975), New York, New York (1977), Ghostbusters (1984), Mask (1985), Say Anything (1989), and My Best Friend's Wedding (1997).

However, Godard did not name Belmondo's alias after the cinematographer.  The cinematographer had not yet started working, nor had Godard met him.  Rather, Godard named Belmondo's alias after another character he had played the previous year in a colleague's film.

Jean-Paul Belmondo played Laszlo Kovacs in Claude Chabrol's 1959 film Leda (aka A Double Tour), the film Chabrol made right after making the two we have seen, Le Beau Serge (1958) and Les Cousins (1959).

The police are on to them.

The police are closing in.

Where will this end?

But what is on their minds is not the police.  Not, "Will we get caught?"  But, "How do I feel about him?"  "How do I feel about her?"  "What do I want to do with my life?"  "Do I like this musical composer?"  "Do I look like Bogart?"

Watch and decide for yourself.

Does he look like Bogart?

Or does he have his own identity?

One that others have wanted to mimic ever since.