Breathless (1960)

A bout de soufflé (original title)
Dir: Jean-Luc Goddard
Cast: Jean-Paul Belmondo. Jean Seberg, Daniel Boulanger

Summary

A small-time thief steals a car and impulsively murders a motorcycle police officer. Wanted by the police, he reunites with a modern American journalism student and attempts to persuade her to run away with him to Italy.

Review

Breathless is my first foray into New Wave Cinema, and overall I enjoyed it although I’m not sure it is the style of film I would spend our watching. There is a modern feel to the movie reminiscent to me of the more recent cinema quality television dramas of the modern age.

According to Roger Ebert Breathless is a film which set the start of many films to come such as Badlands, Bonnie and Clyde and Michel as the countless modern character portrayed by Al Pacino, Jack Nickelson and the like and have to agree. The handheld camera work allows for a more natural feel to scenes you feel like you are looking in on the daily lives. There isn’t the contrived or stilted look of a set scene that occurred in the studio controlled Hollywood movies of the same era.

The story is relatively simple and perhaps the so are the characters on the surface, but there is always more to something in this movie than meets the eye. The is an amorality to the main leads, but it doesn’t alienate us from them Michel is a killer, a wannabe gangster and pursuing (and perhaps the made her pregnant) while already married. Patricia is a wannabe student, is going to enrol in the Sorbonne or is just living a rebellious life in Paris making ends meet. She also seems to be unconcerned about all the thing she finds out a Michel – any morality does not fuel her eventual betrayal.

The film uses jump cuts throughout is editing process which flows with the handheld camera work and keeps interest in the longer scenes. Overall this is an enjoyable film which warrants a second watch.

The exercise says to comment following discourse with fellow students and my research into how successful New Wave Cinema was in exploring human relationships in a time of change. Well, the online community for this course is silent, plus New Wave Cinema is a new area for me. I have spoken to few couple of cinephile friends, and they have roughly the same background knowledge as me. So I have to look at distilling my thoughts from initial research – as to fully explore New Wave would be to dive down a rabbit hole which could take a year to come up from.

“A Bout de Souffle” or “Breathless”, as it is more commonly known in English, by Jean-Luc Goddard is a fascinating film. It is a guess the archetypal New Wave Film. Shot on a handheld camera in a short period – it tells the story of a small-time criminal on the run for the reckless murder of a police officer and his love affair with his American Girlfriend.

This film has a great contemporary feel to it; there is now big a bold about the characters. There is no great unseen motivation behind them. There I a very honest feeling to the film. To quote Roger Ebert, the film depicts how “its narcissistic young heroes are obsessed with themselves and oblivious to the larger society.”

This Candid nature is what New Wave brought to the cinema and the way how we could drop into the lives of relatively ordinary people, who we were living through a time of significant cultural change. New Wave portrayed people mundane lives talking about their lives, their hopes and their sex lives. There was no judgement in how this was presented as they were filmed without the restrictions of the Hays code.

New Wave featured an experimental style, handheld shots and also a lack for formal scripting, which directors were sketching out the film as they went along. They often knew how they wanted the film to look but not what it need to say – and I think helped the development and of the characters. Also, the new technology for high-quality hand holdable camera allow for natural or real feel to the films, which draws the audience into what is happening in the lives of the characters.

Overall, I feel that New Wave was very successful in showing human relationship through the changing times in the same way that the Kitchen Sink drama brought realism into the British Cinema industry.