between grief and nothing
by Douglas Messerli
François
Truffaut and Claude Chabrol (screenplay), Jean-Luc Godard (director) À bout de soufflé
(Breathless) / 1960
I
first saw Jean-Luc Godard’s groundbreaking film À bout de soufflé (Breathless)
sometime close to its original 1960 premiere, and then again several years
later, before watching the Criterion 2007 release yesterday. Having watched the
Turner Classics Movie showing of High
Sierra just the day before, and re-viewing Out of the Past on TCM the same afternoon, I suppose it was
inevitable that the Godard film had been waiting for just this moment on my
Netflix queue, for it was perfect to see this faux noir between two of the best noirs
of the 1940s.
I must admit that the two previous times
I’d seen the Godard film I was not exactly charmed by it; at the age of 13, and
then about 10 years later, I was clearly not mature enough to comprehend how
one might be able to find a chain-smoking, face-mugging, oddly comical,
small-time punk murderer of a policeman as appealing or even intriguing in the
way his young American girlfriend found him to be, and which, by extension, the
film demanded of its audience as well! Taking advantage of every woman he knew
and stealing every American car in sight, Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo)
(also known, in an inside joke, as Laszlo Kovacs, a reference to Belmondo’s
role in Claude Chabrol’s À double tour),
Michel seemed to my younger self as a kind of “troubled adolescent” that I’d
been warned to stay away from; James Dean seemed far more innocent. And, why, I
kept thinking myself, was this film so “chopped up,” filled with what I did not
recognize at the time were Godard’s famed “jump cuts.”
Michel’s gamin-like American girlfriend
Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg), although more recognizable, was equally
puzzling. Although she seemed to have deeper concerns than her thoroughly
attractive (although New York Times critic
Bosley Crowther described him as “hypnotically ugly”) boyfriend—she is
understandably worried about possibly being pregnant with Michel’s child, she
reads and quotes one of my favorites, Faulkner, and she asks far more serious
questions than her colleagues of the self-enchanted sexist writer, Parvulesco,
played by Jean-Pierre Melville (enquiring “What is your greatest ambition in
life?” and a question that seems to point to more serious roles for women than
his focus on their love and faithfulness)—she admits, time and again, that she doesn’t
know what she’s thinking. She often clowns with Michel as if her budding
journalistic career meant little to her. She attends the Sorbonne, evidently,
to keep the checks from home arriving on time. Although she occasionally spouts
somewhat ponderous questions—via Faulkner’s The
Wild Palms asking Michel whether he would chose “grief or nothing”—and
posting great art works by Cezanne, Picasso, and Klee upon her walls, she seems
inept at focusing on any one idea for long. One of the long-standing jokes of
this film is her ineptness at speaking French, as she asks time and again for
the definition of various French idioms: “Qu’est ce que c’esst ‘dégeulasse’?”
(a bitch), “What’s a scumbag?” “What’s that mean ‘puke?’” “What does it mean
‘to make faces?’”—all of which, given our reading them as English subtitles,
makes it appear, at moments, as if she does not understand English either.
Although Patricia ultimately discovers
that her lover is a murderer with a stolen car, and is married, she seems
willing to go along with him just for the sheer excitement of events, a bit
like Bonnie of the later Bonnie and Clyde,
willing to take up with the madman simply to escape the more restrained life in
which she is trapped. Yet the danger of that way of living, particularly given
her restraints of family, language, and possible childbirth, is obviously
apparent to her, as she informs on Michel (a role she previously found disgusting,
while Michel has a more philosophical view of it all: “Informers inform,
burglars burgle, murderers murder, lovers love.”), claiming, that her call to
the police is not about him but simply a test of her own love. Both figures
are, indeed, ridiculously selfish beings. As Michel himself recalls it, “When
we talked, I talked about me, you talked about you, when we should have talked
about each other.” And, in the end, as film critic Roger Ebert puts it: “It is
remarkable that the reviews of this movie do not describe her [Patricia] as a
monster.”
Perhaps it is because the real monster, as loveable as he may be,
is Michel, who would take advantage of the devil if he could. Like so many
American child-men, the French Michel is so completely taken up with his own
image, his own imagination of being, that he cannot distinguish between reality
and life. He is, as he longingly stares at a poster of Humphrey Bogart in The Harder They Fall, a younger Bogart
performing in his mind, rather than in the real streets of Marseilles and
Paris, an imaginary scenario of living which begins when he addresses the
cinema audience as he speeds through the French countryside. Finding a gun in
the stolen car’s glove compartment, he takes it out and, like a child playing cops
and robbers, mockingly pretending to shoot it at passing drivers before
actually shooting bullets into the wilderness, and then, out of fear of being
apprehended, actually shooting it
into the chest of an investigating cop. For such a being, a child in the body
of a grown man, he cannot separate fantasy from reality, and if his quirky
behavior thereafter seems, a times, like a charming noir hero, they are, actually, as we quickly perceive, the actions
of a terrified child, desperate for money, love, safety, and most importantly,
sleep.
Sleep is the one thing this wonderful
film never permits its “heroes.” Even when Michel sneaks into the bed on his
women acquaintances, they awaken him or attempt to throw him out. Since, as he
jokingly quips, he only stays at the wealthy Claridge, which has no rooms
available, he can find no place to sleep in the whole of France. The remarkable
thing about Traffaut’s and Godard’s film (a film in which writing and directing
truly share equal billing) is its almost constant revelation of motion as
characters dress and undress, crawl across beds, curl up and couple under the covers,
wander the streets, outrun the police, and literally hop, jump, and skip
through space. As Patricia puts it: “It’s sad to fall asleep. It separates
people Even when you’re sleeping together, you’re all alone.”
Apparently Godard’s heavy use of
jump-cuts was an accidental result of having to cut more than a half-an-hour
from the final shoot. But the brilliance of these “chance” cuts are that the
film spins us through time in a rhythm of leaps and hops as the two seemingly
unexhausted children play out their lives in a kind of leonine prowl of the
Paris streets, only to finally, in complete fatigue (the “breath’s end” of the
original French title), curl up into death, helped along by the frumpy general
inspector’s gun. The sleek lions of this world are doomed simply because, in
the long night of their adventures, they have been unable to stop. The final
long, lonely run down the rue Champagne-Premiere which ends in Michel’s
collapse is ironically expressed by his reaching up to his own face in order to
close his eyelids, an act that might be usually achieved by a lover or friend.
Patricia, on the chase, reaches him, but stands like the policemen who have
joined her as part of the phalanx of those who were emotionally, at least, dead
already before the chase.
Unlike Patricia, Michel has
comprehended, by film’s end, who he truly is: “After all, I’m an asshole,” a
man who clearly prefers “nothing” over “grief.”
Patricia will have to embrace the grief forever.
Los Angeles,
September 13, 2013
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