Breathless [À bout de souffle] ***** (1960, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean Seberg) – Classic Movie Review 1392

Director Jean-Luc Godard followed three short films with his first and still most celebrated 1960 full-length movie À bout de souffle [Breathless]. A dazzlingly realised homage to American B-movie thrillers, it was written while he was shooting the film by the director from an original story by his then friend, fellow director François Truffaut – though by 1973 they were falling out, and Truffaut was saying Godard was ‘acting like a shit’.

Although unexpectedly popular, it is an art movie and style object. The film’s striking visual style and the then revolutionary-seeming and still fresh-looking jump cuts are deservedly much celebrated and ace cinematographer Raoul Coutard’s startling hand-held camera shots of Paris still hugely impress. Coutard says ‘there was a panache in the way it was edited that didn’t match at all the way it was shot. The editing gave it a very different tone than the films we were used to seeing.’

The two perfectly cast stars are vibrant with vitality. Jean-Paul Belmondo plays Michel Poiccard, a petty gangster, cigarette permanently dangling from his lips or fingers, who models himself on Humphrey Bogart. On the run after stealing a car in Marseille and shooting a cop, he turns for help to his American girlfriend Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg), a student and aspiring journalist, who sells the New York Herald Tribune on the streets of Paris.

The gloriously and gorgeously gamine Seberg is the archetypal American in Paris. She’s very boyish but glamorous at the same time. Belmondo oozes easy, rough-trade sex appeal.

It is one of the undisputed main glories of French New Wave (La Nouvelle Vague) cinema. Godard described it as: ‘We barged into the cinema like cavemen into the Versailles of Louis XV.’ Godard, who makes a brief appearance as a police informer, shot the movie on a tiny budget in a month and it won him the Best Director award at the Berlin Film Festival. Another French director Jean-Pierre Melville also has a cameo.

Godard saw Breathless as a reportage (documentary) and got Coutard to shoot the entire film on a hand-held camera with next to no lighting.

Truffaut based his story on a newspaper article about Michel Portail and his American girlfriend and journalist Beverly Lynette. In 1952 Portail stole a car to visit his sick mother in Le Havre and ended up killing a motorcycle cop. Truffaut worked with Chabrol on the script, but they could not agree on a storyline.

Godard took over, but wrote the script as he went along. The film was largely improvised on the spot, with Godard writing dialogue in an exercise book no one else was allowed to see. He gave the lines to Belmondo and Seberg while having a few brief rehearsals, then filming the scenes. There was no permission to shoot the film in the side streets and boulevards of Paris, adding to a spontaneous feel. The film was shot chronologically, apart from the first sequence, filmed towards the end of the shoot.

Seberg agreed to star for $15,000, roughly a sixth of the film’s budget, which was 400,000 francs, around $80,000.

The film is dedicated to the humble, poverty-row American film studio Monogram Pictures, which is both charming and pretentious at the same time. It enjoyed an enormous success: when first released in France, the film attracted 2,082,760 cinema-goers there. Godard won the Silver Bear for Best Director at the 1960 Berlin International Film Festival and the 1960 Prix Jean Vigo.

Breathless was ranked as the No. 13 best film of all time in the British Film Institute’s 2012 Sight and Sound Critics’ Poll.

Breathless is a great title but ‘À bout de souffle’ translates as ‘out of breath’, which makes better sense in the context.

Also in the cast are Daniel Boulanger as Police Inspector Vital, Henri-Jacques Huet as Antonio Berruti, Roger Hanin as Carl Zumbach, Van Doude as Van Doude, Liliane Dreyfus as Lilane, Michel Fabre as the other inspector, Jean-Pierre Melville as Parvulesco, Claude Mansard as the used car salesman, Jean-Luc Godard as an informer, Richard Balducci as Tolmachoff, Philippe de Broca as an extra, Jean Domarchi as an extra, Jean Douchet as an extra, Jean Herman as an extra, Andre S. Labarthe as an extra, and Jacques Rivette as the body of the man hit by a car.

It originally had an X certificate and now enjoys a PG! A fully restored version of the film was released in the US for its 50th anniversary in May 2010.

À bout de souffle [Breathless] was remade in 1983 as Breathless by director Jim McBride, with Richard Gere and Valerie Kaprisky.

Godard is also the maker of A Woman Is a Woman (1961) Le Mépris, Pierrot le fou and La Chinoise. He is the subject of the 2017 biopic Redoubtable.

Legendary French cinematographer Raoul Coutard, who worked with Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Jacques Demy and Costa-Gavras, died on 8 November 2016, aged 92. He got his big break working Godard on Breathless. Coutard worked on more than 80 features in a career spanning 1958 to 2001.

RIP Jean-Paul Belmondo, treasured iconic star of Godard’s Breathless [À bout de souffle] (1960). He was born on 9 April 1933 and died on 6 September 2021 in Paris, aged 88. Breathless made him a major star of the French New Wave even though he said ‘I don’t know what they mean’ when people used that term.

Godard directed Belmondo in a 1958 short Charlotte and Her Boyfriend, and they then made Breathless [À bout de souffle] (1960), A Woman Is a Woman (1961) and Pierrot le Fou (1965) together.

© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 1392

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