Rating: 3.5 / 5
Escaping everyday life, petty criminal Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo) steals a car and drives it towards Paris. During a traffic stop, he shoots a policeman and is on the run from now on. Arrived in Paris, he can hide with the American student Patricia (Jean Seberg). The two fall in love, but don’t have enough money to escape. Meanwhile, the police are always on Poet’s heels.
In dreams we all like to escape from everyday life. Some metaphysics that we try to explain in the reality we know is then the crossroads of thought and dialogue is forever just one of many interpretations. Breathless is the debut film by French Nouvelle Vague pioneer Jean-Luc Godard. It tells of a Bonnie and Clyde story in the middle of a world that is slowly but surely opening up completely to capitalism and in which people are trying to escape from the established norms. This film is considered a milestone of the film. Technical tracking shots and overall innovations in the technology segment are described as groundbreaking. A homage to cinema, to the old, very old Hollywood cinema, with heroes who have ventured into the dirtiest morass in the world. This film is also perhaps a precursor to the critical and rebellious cinema that would later become known as New Hollywood.
Where Travis Bickle asks if he would be spoken to and Bonnie and Clyde only know one end of their journey is Except breathing ahead of its time. In this way, characters are presented in their entire morality from a perspective that can make people doubt and perhaps only really establish anti-heroism with it. There’s this unassuming rebel Michael who steals a car and shoots a cop. It quickly turns into a drama and so he flees to Paris, where he meets the American student Patricia, who had previously met in the south of France. He falls in love and together they try to raise enough money to flee to Italy. This is minimalist cinema. This is a story that focuses only on a simple plot, while the morally ambivalent characters are left to be interpreted. There is, of course, a fascination for those figures who repeatedly add a walk into the shadows to their CV. But as flawless as this story may seem and a scandal of the time was certainly clear, from today’s perspective it is a story that could not be more uninspired. Now it is in the eye of the beholder whether one can accuse a film of not also standing out from works that were created decades after its release. But that is also what makes the rating appeal, because a masterpiece is above such things.
You could be nasty now and complain a little about the patriarchal structures and the importance of women here. It would probably be possible to view very few works without a complaint. But it is certainly the woman who falls a little short of expectations here. Of course one can criticize that one does not find out exactly how the relationship between the two got to this point in the first place. On the other hand, it’s just as refreshing that Godard refrains from extensive exposure of characters who, simply in this respect, maybe don’t deliver that much. Because the tension pulls Breathless much more on whether the gangster couple will be caught and how far they will go to save their skins. The figures also appear helpless, so to speak, because they are completely overwhelmed by their being and the potential hustle and bustle afterwards. A bit of existentialism flows in that takes the characters to the edge of their thoughts. Because if nothingness is the end, it’s still more bearable than endless suffering.
Godard deliberately chose the staging tricks that caused the plot to falter and the film apparently to be in danger of collapsing, and they still fit into the calm and slow art house cinema today. That alone doesn’t do anything with the work, because the work is far from good just because of its influence on other works. In that respect you could Transformers (2007) as a good action movie. But the true strength of the film lies in its drastic nature. Because while Bonnie and Clyde could never be separated, in the end Patricia and Michel are no longer of the same mold. Of course, one could also have endless debates about the importance of women with regard to the finale, but this is more about cynicism, according to which every rebel is either resocialized by the state or the Gar is identified. In this respect, the question naturally remains as to what state France was in in the 1950s and 1960s. But sadly, the film completely omits the social level and actually only shows what has become of the characters, but not the background of it. That might be artistic vision or something like that, but it should be essential for the overall context of the story.
In order to come back to the character constellation within the film, it is striking that Godard has chosen a team with the establishment of the small-time crook Poiccard and the student Franchini, which takes place in different social classes. Here too the film suffers from the fact that these differences are no longer interpreted as interpretation due to the lack of exposition. At the same time, you can do this quite well. So here the petty crook certainly stands for the proletariat, which is deliberately kept small by capitalism in this form and is also clearly exploited. In this respect, the individual has, perhaps at a certain point, no choice but to rebel. It is significant that the less compliant student then seeks the way to order and in doing so betrays the man. Of course, there can also be a certain misogyny in it, although that’s probably less the case because there’s simply not enough about the psyche of the characters to find a clear answer.
Some people will see it differently, but the truth is that Breathless as an innovative project is masterful, while the pure film, especially from today’s point of view, suffers from the fact that it can no longer keep up with the standards set thereafter. It’s groundbreaking on a technical level, but that’s just part of the story. In addition, the main actors deliver a strong performance and show the social discord in a great way.
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