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 to 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 The 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 choose “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 pretends 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, at 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 Truffaut’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
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2013).
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