Godard Season: Breathless (Dir Jean-Luc Godard, 1h30m, 1960)

It's sometime in the late 1940s and two men, Francois and Jean-Luc, are sitting in one of the ciné-clubs  in the Latin quarter of Paris in the post-war years; they're emblematic of an increasing cinematic literacy across the nation. Their faces are lit by film, as they will be in a few years, when they turn critics, both writing for the influential (and still published!) Cahiers du Cinéma, and go on the attack against the La qualité française-the traditional "French Quality", as Francois will blisteringly word it. A couple of years after penning the manifesto for the auteurist movement they will both help birth, Francois will, whilst Jean-Luc juggles shorts, and editing Cahiers du Cinéma,  make The 400 Blows (La Quatre Cent Coups), a film based upon his troubled childhood. It will, almost single-handedly, launch the French New Wave. and be regarded in future years as one of the greatest films of all time. Almost single-handedly.

For Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard would actively collaborate exactly once in careers that, by the end of the 1960s, see them bitterly divided, to the point of a back and forth correspondence of acerbic letters, and open critiques of the direction the other had taken, only ending with Truffaut's death in October 1984. But what a collaboration: Breathless (À bout de souffle), in which a petty thief (the epitome of Gallic cool, in the form of Jean-Paul Belmondo) murders a policeman then turns to his love interest, Patricia (the iconic Jean Seberg), for escape, not only tears up the cinema rulebook in ways that would utterly change the way the French New Wave and beyond would make films but, in a seemingly effortless, and in tres cool fashion, rewrite its grammar in ways that would prove lastlingly influential.

Enter Michel, a perfect encapsulation of the cinema-mad, openly nihilistic French youth of the 1950s and early 60s-modeling himself on Bogart, and a petty criminal, who is essentially introduced hot-wiring a car, and leaving a girl behind in Marseilles, the sharply dressed Belmondo slouches into view, and straight into cinematic iconography,a cigarette constantly in his mouth and wearing a seemingly perpetual frown. But Michel is, in the first of many layers of artifice, an affectation, a young Frenchman who believes in nothing but the heroes on the screen, acting tougher than he actually is, and emulating a man whose career lay a full decade if not more in the past, and who had been dead for three years by the time Godard's film released. Michel is at once an author avatar, a man raised on cinema and turning to petty crime seemingly out of boredom (Godard in later years admitting he stole from his family to fund his own cinema-going and making) and a death-searching ultra-cool nihilist.

What he does next, what Godard does next, as Michel drives his stolen car from Marseilles to Paris, is revolutionary. Michel turns and speaks to camera-in an instant, in a turn of Belmondo's head to stare down the camera, Godard blurs the lines between narrative cinema, and reportage, the language of documentary cinema. Whilst much of this stylistic choice is from Godard, (and heavily influenced by Moi, un noir (1958), an ethnographic film that blurs fact and fictional narrative), you cannot discount the work of the film's cinematographer, Raoul Coutard, a war photographer and camera-man, and a backup to Godard's original choice, shooting much of this journey from passenger seat and backseat in quasi-documentary style, on a handheld camera, as Michel mocks his fellow motorists, and pulls a gun from the glovebox to brandish it.

Soon chased by a police motorcyclist, the film snaps back into narrative cinema, with Michel shooting the officer, and making his escape to Paris, thus setting in motion the ever-closing net of Inspector Vital (Daniel Boulanger) that threatens to ensnare him; arriving in Paris, he meets up with another lover, steals from her purse whilst she is dressing, and finally meets up with Patricia (Jean Seberg); their walk down the Champs-Élysées, as Martial Solal's underrated, and beautifully stated score plays, is not just one of the greatest scenes in cinema, but once again shows Godard blurring the lines between the real-life Parisian street around his actors, at points with Coutard hiding inside a cart or being pushed in a wheelchair, the portability of the camera, and the often improvised dialogue allowing Godard et al to make the film in a prototype of the guerilla film-making that independent film and the 80s and 90s underground would emulate in decades to come.

Patricia, for her part, is almost the antithesis of Michel's passionate nihilism-modern critics considering these two figures, often improvising their way through scenes, including the lengthy bedroom sequence in which Patricia's apathy, her rejection of the existence that Michel dubs meaningless even as he intensely clings to it, butts up against his love of a meaningless life that he lives to its most intense. Like magnets, they are opposites that cannot help but attract, and it it this dichotomy that Godard would explore over his next few films. We see them separate, Patricia meeting with an editor who wants her to interview an author, who the film eventually reveals as a shadowy mirror of Michel himself, whilst, low on funds, Michel turns to Tolmachoff, his friend, who now works at an airline, who has been storing money for him, and who is eventually forced to rat out his friend. They reunite, and drive across Paris, and it is here, driving through the streets, that Godard pulls perhaps the greatest editing trick in cinema.

He, or editor Cécile Decugis, inserts a jump-cut. The scene cuts to, well, itself, and our protagonists, later in their journey. This itself isn't entirely new; the Soviet Socialist Realists, like Eisenstein, used them extensively to heighten tension, best seen in Arsenal (1929), and Man With a Movie Camera (1930), a film practically constructed from the technique, whilst its use in the West usually focused on unreality or as a special effect, but was largely regarded as improper cutting. In short, it's an indicator of the passing of time, or a change of scene, perhaps best seen in 2001 A Space Odyssey's jump/match cut, in which an ape's bone becomes, as millions of years pass in a single frame, a satellite (itself purloined from A Canterbury Tale, (1945), in which a hunting hawk becomes a Spitfire). In a single moment, a single snip of film-stock, Godard, Seberg, and the car time-travel. The jump-cut has arrived in cinema.

Her head changes direction. We're in a different part of Paris. We've stepped forward in time. It still feels incredibly daring, as much a moment of cinematic jazz as its soundtrack is, playing with the rhythm, the tempo, the language of jazz like a free-form group - even if it may have been born as a moment of necessity - supposedly the film was simply physically too long - or because Godard simply felt the film flowed better this way, or because the film was running out of time and budget and Godard simply axed what didn't work or felt superfluous. It is the moment of Breathless that turns cinema on its head. More than this, though, it is emblematic of the meaningless of its protagonists' lives-the places change, they move forward through life, but nothing changes, nothing matters, and it is this feeling that permeates the rest of the film.

For Breathless is a film about nothing, Its narrative sees a man murder another man, and flee to Paris to take refuge with a woman he supposedly loves, as the men hunting him close in, but, in sharp contrast to its jump cuts, in its dialogue, Breathless is remarkably verité, naturalistic, Michel and Patricia discussing their relationship with each other, with their feelings about the world-the real-world visit of Eisenhower to Paris is a minor plot-point, real films form set dressing. The very real lives of Seberg and Belmondo, the very real world around them, intersect with this narrative, but despite the long-takes in which Godard lets the camera run, and the ad-libbed dialogue, they talk about...nothing. They live lives of nothingness, of empty discussion, in a film that, for all its incredible technical and narrative and cinematic innovation, is about hollow people trying and failing to live for something.

Our protagonists, thus, drift inexorably forward, running out of time, until an act of betrayal sets our hero on a course of inevitable, and yet passionately determined self-destruction, and it is here that the film's other great theme of death, of seeking death to feel something, in a film that otherwise drifts through an utterly detached life, only occasionally interspersed with flashes of passion, as though only in destruction can one feel life, a feeling that permeates the entire French New Wave. Nothing captures the genre better though, than Breathless. Sixty-three years after its release, there is a stunning freshness, a coolness that remains indelible, and made stars of its director, its detached hero, and its heroine.

Like only Citizen Kane before it, Breathless is when the New Wave breaks, changing French and 1960s American Cinema. Nowhere is this debt to these two filmmakers more evident than in the fact that both Truffaut and Godard were seriously considered to direct the equally influential  Bonnie and Clyde (1967).The finished film, directed by Arthur Penn, shows a great stylistic debt to Breathless, though its lasting legacy as a film may have been to open the gates to more graphic violence, whilst Godard and Truffaut would take very different directions from their sole cinematic collaboration, which we will follow, in part, over the rest of Godard Season.

But no film in the past 60 years has been as influential, no film as timelessly cool, no film as innovative. Breathless is, simply put, one of the most important films ever made, a cinematic big bang erupting into life on the mean streets of Paris.

Rating; Must See

 Next week, we continue our discussion of Godard with the off-beat Bande à part, in which a trio of oddball robbers commit a daring heist, and Jean-Luc Godard commits a daring raid against the very rules of cinema.

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