To those who "don't understand"
Author: izmatt (izmatt18@cinci.rr.com) from Cincinnati, Ohio
1 December 2005
I don't blame those who state that they do not "understand" the superlatives surrounding Jean-Luc Godard's 1960 masterpiece, Breathless. It's primarily because to appreciate Breathless, one has to view the movie from a historical context, which also requires studying of not only the French New Wave, but film theories as a whole, and the lives of those apart of the New Wave. Breathless accomplished many things unprecedented prior (many completely unprecedented, but some things are not-so-much).
Roger Ebert put it best when he said that just as film fanatics may now stand outside a movie theatre waiting for the next Quentin Tarantino movie to be released, film enthusiasts were doing so for Godard in the 1960s. He was a revolutionary, which is why MovieMaker magazine called him the 4th most influential director of ALL-TIME (only behind Welles, Griffith, and Hitchcock)! What did Godard do different? Breathless is all style, simple as that. The story line is interesting, yes, but is Godard's aesthetics, production modes, subject matters, and storytelling methods that are key. First of all, the whole movie was shot on a hand-held camera, just like most all New Wave pictures. It was, however, only shot by two people (Godard and his cinematographer, Rouald) on a budget that did not top $50,000, a mere fraction of what most pictures cost at the time (another facet of the New Wave). It was shot completely on location in Paris, and utilized new film-making techniques that would be used by film-making students for decades to come (such as putting the camera in a mail cart on the Champs Elysees and following Belmondo and Seberg). Note Godard's use of American cinema influence, and how the montage art of the 1950s impacted this aesthetic.
(A brief New Wave lesson: Most New Wave directors were displeased with the "tradition of quality," or the older generation directors who, as Truffaut put it, made the "twelve or so" pictures per year that represented France at Venice and Cannes. Most of these pictures classic or modern literary adaptations, completely stagnant in artistic quality with rehashed subject matters based on historical periods. New Wave directors supported NEW tales of modern Parisian life, primarily, and were sick of the themes found in the tradition of quality films.) The storytelling methods in Breathless are perhaps the most fascinating part of the film. The jump cuts may seem lame, but one must again view them from a historical context: it had never been done before. This is exactly why Breathless is important -- practically every technique was revolutionary. They are so submerged into film-making practices now that Breathless seems typical. Yet at the time, it was, as I said prior, unprecedented.
119 out of 154 people found the following review useful:
Revolutionary. Brilliant. Oh so pretty
Author: NykDex from Dublin, Ireland
23 October 2001
This Movie, a triumph of the French Nouvelle Vague, marks a turning point, not only for the Director, Jean-Luc Godard, but for anyone who sees it. The plot, though intriguing, is secondary to the incredible presentation. Use of hand-held cameras and jump-cuts (where the director cuts from one angle to a shot of the same angle two seconds later, a stylistic effect that can show freneticism or boredom) were revolutionary at the time, yet can still surprise and delight today.
Jean Seaberg is excellent, with the nicest accent you'll ever hear, as are the supporting cast, all rounded stereotypes. But the leading man outshines all the others. A virtuoso display from Jean-Paul Belmondo as Michel Poiccard makes the viewer swoon and scorn in equal measures. He doesn't make it easy for us to empathize with him, yet we still do, and in doing, we feel we have earned something.
Revolutionary. Brilliant. Oh so pretty.
49 out of 83 people found the following review useful:
Ladies and Gentlemen, the 8th Wonder of the World: Jean-Luc Godard.
Author: nutsy from Olympia, Washington
27 October 2003
This is the one that started it all. With the story of a man on the run calling himself Laszlo Kovacs (a cinematographer of the time), Jean-Luc Godard arrived in the movies (well, on the production end, at least). This also more than his typical film essay. The story by Francois Truffaut makes for a terrific Godard script (the Truffaut stamp makes it comparable to SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER). Jean-Paul Belmondo does well in the Kovacs role, humanizing our bad-guy hero right up to the slam-bang finish. Jean Seberg is his conflicted lover who must... well, just watch. A landmark of the French New Wave, which is one of the most important movements in cinema. Vastly superior to the 1983 BREATHLESS with Richard Geer and Fassinder's homage THE AMERICAN SOLDIER. This is guaranteed to be like few movies you've seen before (unless, of course, you're a fan of the New Wave). BREATHLESS is also very memorable for its music and unusual photography. Shows how European film brought out the importance of character in film and raised it to new heights (whereas in American film, a close-up is the closest you'll get to character development). This is a must for any film student and for anyone who just loves movies.
3 out of 3 people found the following review useful:
a fabulous subtle ...something
Author: tayuf from France
16 November 2010
I am not an expert in movie techniques or cinema history, I couldn't even give a definition of new wave. I am not even a big fan of Godard, except for "a bout de soufflz". This movie deserves to be in the top 10. But if you look at ratings, it's basically either 10 or 1. I am not going to describe why this movie is so good, I wouldn't be able to anyway. But I think the effect of it lies in Michel's character (kind of crazy, cynical, with an incredible distant and happy attitude and self confidence that gives him some particular charm. Belmondo's performance to act this especially complex and subtle character is outstanding), and the overall realization that gets you like some abstract paintings sometimes do. Surely lots of people wrote tons of technical stuffs to explain all this. Now why so many of so-called movie enthusiast in the IMDb hated it? I understood from reading the reviews that many of them are from students who "had" to watch it for their class. I guess it's not the best way to appreciate it. As there is no way anyone could appreciate the Mona Lisa in the Louvre museum, looking at it at 10 m in a crowd. A word that comes a lot is "boring". I guess some people don't see in movies anything else than a technique used as a support for a storyline. It's like saying food is just fuel to walk. I guess they're the same who put all these blockbusters in the top 250. Not that I don't like Hollywood big productions but they don't go at all beyond entertainment, which is good but not enough. And finally, there might be some cultural misunderstanding. A reviewer wrote that he hated Michel because he kept stealing cars...I was just puzzled by such stupidity. This is definitely not a movie to be watched if you have been formatted by TV and Hollywood blockbusters since you were born, like apparently a growing majority of IMDb members.
My mother used to take me to the cinema since I was a little kid, and one of my first memories of a film is Buñuel's "Robinson Crusoe" (1954). Maybe it started in me a liking for different cinema languages, other than the American system of audiovisual representation. A few years later, Godard shot in 1959 "À bout de soufflé", a motion picture that had a strong impact on me: I did not know what was going on, with so many new elements before my eyes, like the jump cuts during a car ride, the long sequence with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg in a hotel room, or the last tracking shot when Belmondo is running for his life and Seberg acquires his gestures. Now I know that it was a groundbreaking film, that Godard was revolutionizing the art of editing, but for me it was an introduction to a Brechtian approach in narrating events. It is still one of my all-time favorite movies, and now I recognize its influences in many films of its time, like Richard Lester's films with The Beatles.
1 out of 1 people found the following review useful:
Gets the Creative Impulses Going
Author: jzappa from Cincinnati, OH, United States
2 May 2011
Countless excellent films are classics. Some prevail as milestones. The meagerest handful, in an objective historical sense, merit being termed innovations. This truly visceral rush of a movie goes unmistakably on one of those fingers you'd count on one hand in the last group. Godard committed the film to the cut-rate gangster B pictures that this somewhat satirical urban drama was bringing into play and completely aping. Jean-Paul Belmondo plays Michel, a petty thief who kills a highway cop. Although in retreat to Rome, he stops in Paris and hooks up with his sometime girlfriend Patricia, a sexy American tomboy whose glamour is her detached flightiness. As they talk, make love and unenthusiastically evade the police, Godard reveals them to be the sort of young people that the movies had never before portrayed, bustling in the here and now, unmindful of traditional ethics, desperate to affect views and approaches to life like a fashion style. Theirs is an inborn existentialism, and Godard's leading actors make it just about hopelessly relatable.
Lean and physical, Belmondo became an international star by seizing Michel's disarming fusion of weakness and bandit bluster. Godard at one time had the same enthusiasm, but he's not over-romantic about it. As played by Jean Seberg, Patricia is a star-spangled cat, a memorable intermingling of idol and priss, a fitting image for the next generation's possibilities and duplicity. Truffaut wrote the basic plot line and hardly gets sufficient recognition for its neat, sly effortlessness.
But what makes this 87-minute generation-maker ground-breaking comes not from dense cerebral matters but from Godard's off-hand impulsiveness, a carefree attitude of winging it that cheerfully foils what's exhausted in previous movies. While Godard knew that fugitive outlaw flicks could no longer be played square, he knew that the dominant notions of qualified craftsmanship, formal visual compositions, basic editing, had become a confinement, a manner of blinding us to the possibilities of capturing the world. Cinema was the slave children in the Temple of Doom, and Godard was Indiana Jones. Truffaut was Short Round, at heart at least.
The movie's most outrageous practice at the time is its abundant use of jump cuts, a consciously raucous cutting technique that Godard uses to induce urban life's dashing, shuddering pulse. Georges Melies is credited as the minister of the jump cut on account of having done it accidentally, only then using it as sleight-of-hand. This, I think, could be why Godard would use such a technique, because it feels and seems so purely accidental that it gives the work that blunt boost of candidness. Captivated by the modern city as it's truly lived in, he hurls Raoul Coutard's inimitable camera through dumpy, practically closet-size apartments and swarming streets, engulfing us in the disorderly spin of a modern world where everything ultimately rear-ends: Michel and Patricia's pseudo-melodrama bursts into a presidential procession on the Champs Elysees, and movie posters toss out an sardonic interpretation of the romance-famished souls of those passing them by.
No other director had ever before harmonized Godard's sense of the indefinable grain of the modern, particularly his incisive recognition that many of our key experiences now came through the media. While this is unmistakably the situation with Patricia, who interviews novelists, cites from Faulkner and even vends the New York Herald Tribune, it's more critically true of Michel, whose code of honor comes directly from B-movies. There may be no more revealing moment in any '60s movie than Michel gazing at a picture of Humphrey Bogart and insecurely running his thumb across his lips just like Bogey, or how contagious this gesture becomes. Even outside of the film, shortly after it initially emerged, not only were millions imitating Belmondo's own gestures but filmmakers started to emulate Godard. His tracks are noticed in everything from Bonnie and Clyde to Scorsese and Coppola to today's somewhat deluded music videos and TV commercials.
After this witty, deadpan milestone, Godard created a stream of movies that may be the greatest epoch of uninterrupted deconstructive innovation in movie history, whether I like them all or not. Nonetheless, the knack of this rhythmic, affecting masterwork seizes the cadences and mercilessness of city life, the trouble-free corruption of youthful impulsiveness, the despondent blind alley of male-female dealings, the fated idealism of those raised on old movies. Arguably the most mutinous of innovative films, Breathless is also the most crisp.
1 out of 1 people found the following review useful:
À Bout De Soufflé
Author: bcarlos from Spain
22 March 2011
À Bout De Soufflé follows Michel Poiccard, a car thief that goes by the name of Laszlo Kovacs, in his relationship with an American girl in Paris, as he escapes from the police and tries to get the money a friend owes him. Regarded as one of the most important and influential films in history, it has its fame well achieved. In the same year that William Wyler shot Ben-Hur, Jean-Luc Godard invented modern cinema with ingenious angles, hand-held camera, jump cuts, natural dialogue and an emphasis in the relationships between the characters more than in the actual plot.
Godard takes a typical film noir plot to criticize both the amorality of his generation and the obsession of many young people to be like their heroes of the screen. Although the film is a landmark and a symbol of French cinema, the theme of the couple escaping from justice is now seen as a cliché of American cinema. Actually, the whole film has some American feel to it, and that's the proof of its gigantic influence.
Aside of all of its artistic genius, the film is also surprisingly entertaining and appealing to a conventional audience. There is a sequence that lasts for thirty five minutes in which they're basically talking in bed, and this scene plays of with engaging and natural dialogue and overall feels like just ten minutes have passed, and by looking at the ending and all the dialogues in the film it seems to me highly improbable that this film was made without and actual written script (as the legend says).
The performances, especially from Jean Seberg, are excellent and she is both adorable and despicable, while Jean-Paul Belmondo gives his most iconic character a true and realistic feel.
À Bout De Soufflé is a relationship-based film noir with groundbreaking direction and editing, fascinating dialogues, highly influential performances both in and outside the film and it is a masterpiece from Jean-Luc Godard.
Rating: 5/5.
6 out of 11 people found the following review useful:
One of the - if not THE - best movies ever made
Author: Ivo Habets from The Hague, Netherlands
13 April 2004
Recently I saw this movie for the second time; the first time was over ten years ago. Vaguely I remembered that it made quite an impression, just like all the early Godard movies (which, in those days, were fortunately broadcast by the German tv). Well, to be short: this movie is absolutely stunning, fantastic, sublime, smashing, et cetera. This is film just like film should be: not a stupid story told in a boring matter - like most movies do - but downright art, excuse me, ART. There is a wonderful co-operation between director, photography, actors, and the scenery of France, Paris in particular. Jean-Paul Belmondo has never been a truly great actor; after playing in some early Godards he appeared mainly in quite bad Hollywood-style French thrillers. But somehow he seems to be the right man in the right place. Jean Seberg is not only unbelievably beautiful but also the absolute star of the movie (at least on the screen). She is just perfect in her role. And last but not least: the soundtrack by French jazz star Martial Solal is completely spot on. There is clear synergy between the restless photography, the restless music and of course the restless characters of the protagonists.
This movie cannot be missed. It belongs in a league with for example Bertolucci's Il Conformista, Bunuel's Belle de Jour, Godard's own Le Mépris (completely different by the way). More than that: it was an important step in creating an entirely new way of making and assessing films. In other words: one of the - if not THE - best and important movies ever made.
9 out of 17 people found the following review useful:
thoughts on another viewing of Breathless - it improves on repeat viewings
Author: MisterWhiplash from United States
17 April 2003
Breathless was a film I did not warm up to easily the first time I saw it, as it was my first film I had seen from Jean-Luc Godard, and thought it was (un-fairly) too "French". On top of that, I felt displeased with Jean-Paul Belmondo's performance. After seeing the film again, and then a third time, I still find it to not be my absolute favorite Godard, but it is a lot better film than I first remembered. Much better. In fact, it is what pretty much anyone who has praise for the movie says it is: It's one of the benchmarks of post-modernist film-making (what Godard said was accidental in "jump-cuts", evident in the fast pace of when Michel is in the car at the beginning of the film), and it is quite a good deal of fun even when it slows down and we get those long hand-held shots by Raoul Cotard.
The music is catchy (I find myself whistling the theme music and some of the other music in the film), Belmondo is interesting even when he's acting like a ironic rebel (and, upon repeated viewings, Belmondo grew on me even more as I realized my initial reaction was to the punk-like quality of the character, which is of course the point), and Godard seems to be relishing in his Jazzy usage and control of the camera. It is exhilarating and I look forward to re-watching it again and again; bottom line, A Bout de soufflé was appropriately Godard's breakthrough, and on a first viewing it may turn off some more than others who aren't prepared - or, indeed, may be prepared but are too used to what Godard had already broken through with some almost 50 years ago. It does deserve a second viewing, or more, to understand it or perhaps be enthralled or whatever by it.
1 out of 2 people found the following review useful:
Homage to classic American cinema and great example of innovative European cinema
Author: zeppelin-fest from Deriaonlo
20 January 2012
Even though, the chances are slim that anyone ever reads this review, especially when they are hundreds of reviews already out there, it seemed necessary to express enthusiasm once more and to add one or more previously neglected detail.
It is OK to watch this film in bed on a small b/w TV. But whether or not you chose such a nostalgic setting, it is definitely OK to watch it a hundred times.
The film is about style. It breaks rules and surprises us with fresh editing. It delivers an atmosphere which is hard to beat. Do not make the mistake to believe the protagonists are seducing each other. They are solely seducing you. The naturalness of the famous bedroom talk is a performance. It is,however, a performance which is particularly enticing because of its off-beat naturalness. By the end of the film at the latest it becomes clear who is ultimately addressed: Jean Seberg looks directly into your eyes.
The story of the mysterious women is repeated once again but expressed strangely and beautifully by Jean Seberg. Whereas the hard-boiled gangster turns out to be a shallow copy of the romantic hero represented in western cinema, the heartless and mysterious femme fatale embodies the audience par excellence: she does not only watch the hero's actions with detachment, she also repeats his gestures, she constantly asks questions and then finally she turns to you for answers.
Thus, ultimately the film is not about gangsters or femmes fatales but about cinema itself. It pays homage to the classic American cinema and provides at the same time the best example of innovative European cinema. It deconstructs former cinematic rules and accelerates breathlessly with innovation.
