Breathless (1960 film)

Breathless
original film poster
Directed by	Jean-Luc Godard
Produced by	Georges de Beauregard
Written by	Jean-Luc Godard François Truffaut
Starring	Jean-Paul Belmondo Jean Seberg
Music by	Martial Solal
Distributed by	Films Around the World, Inc.
Release date(s)	March 16 1960 (France)
Running time	87 minutes
Language	French with some English
All Movie Guide profile
IMDb profile

Breathless (French: À bout de souffle; literally "out of breath") is a 1960 film directed by Jean-Luc Godard. Godard's first feature-length film is one of the inaugural and best-known films of the French New Wave. He wrote it with fellow New Wave director, François Truffaut, and released it the year after Truffaut's The 400 Blows and Alain Resnais's Hiroshima, Mon Amour. Together the three films brought international acclaim to the New Wave. Breathless shocked contemporary audiences with its bold visual style and editing—much of which broke the rules of classical Hollywood cinema. Most notable of its innovations were jolting jump cuts and hand-held camera.

Synopsis

Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is a young thug who models himself after Humphrey Bogart. After stealing a car, Michel shoots a policeman who has followed him onto a country road. Penniless and on the run from the police, he turns to his American girlfriend Patricia (Jean Seberg), a student and aspiring journalist, who sells the New York Herald Tribune on the streets of Paris. The ambiguous Patricia agrees to hide him and the two spend their time evading the police and dallying in her apartment, while he tries to raise money for a trip to Italy. Eventually, she betrays him and phones the police. They shoot him in the street and, after a protracted death run, he dies there.

Closing dialogue

Michel's death scene is one of the most iconic scenes in the film, but the film's final lines of dialogue are the source of some confusion for English-speaking audiences. In some translations, it is unclear whether Michel is condemning Patricia, or alternatively condemning the world in general. As Patricia and Detective Vital catch up with the dying Michel, there is the following exchange, according to the transcript published in Dudley Andrew's book on the film:

MICHEL: C'est vraiment dégueulasse.
PATRICIA: Qu'est ce qu'il a dit?
VITAL: Il a dit que vous êtes "une dégueulasse".
PATRICIA: Qu'est ce que c'est "dégueulasse"?^[1]

In his book, Andrew translates the dialogue thus:

MICHEL: That's really disgusting.
PATRICIA: What did he say?
VITAL: He said, "You are really a bitch."
PATRICIA: What is "déguelasse" [bitch]?

Andrew's translation obscures the point of the original French, which is that Vital mishears Michel. This mishearing stems in part from the similarity between Michel's first word, "C'est" (It is/That is) and the word "T'es" (You are), which are hard to distinguish audibly. It also stems from the ambiguity of the word "déguelasse", which can either be an adjective ("disgusting"), or a noun ("disgusting thing", rendered as 'bitch' by Andrew). By hearing "T'es", Vital understands Michel's line as a condemnation of Patricia, but if, in fact, Michel says "C'est", he could be referring to his situation in general, and not specifically blaming Patricia. Other translations have made Vital's mishearing more obvious. In the English captioning of the 2001 Fox-Lorber Region One DVD, "déguelasse" is translated as "scumbag", producing the following dialogue:

MICHEL: It's really a scumbag.
PATRICIA: What did he say?
VITAL: He said, "You're a scumbag".
PATRICIA: What's a scumbag?

The 2007 Criterion Collection Region One DVD uses a less literal translation that renders the French into a familiar American colloquialism:

MICHEL: Makes me want to puke.
PATRICIA: What did he say?
VITAL: He said you make him want to puke.
PATRICIA: What's that mean, "puke"?

References to other films and media

Car thief Michel Poiccard, played by Jean-Paul Belmondo, eyes a movie theater photograph of his idol, Humphrey Bogart.

Breathless makes numerous references to films. Michel's constant lip-rubbing is a direct homage to Humphrey Bogart, a poster of whom Michel gazes at in one scene and says, "Bogie". Bogart is referenced again when Patricia hides from a detective in the movie theatre: audio from The Maltese Falcon can be heard in the background. Moreover, Patricia comments on Michel's similarity to Bogart when she tells him that he is only an image and should say more about himself. The film includes additional references to many other films. In one scene, "Bob Montagne" is mentioned, an apparent reference to the proto-New Wave film Bob le Flambeur (1955), the title character of which shares the same name. A few American film posters are seen in the streets, including Humphrey Bogart's The Harder They Fall and Ten Seconds to Hell with Jack Palance (who would later work with Godard on Contempt). Michel and Patricia also attend a screening of Budd Boetticher's Westbound and she sneaks into a theatre showing Preminger's film noir, Whirlpool (1949) with Gene Tierney. The film also makes reference to Godard's work as a critic for Cahiers du Cinéma: a woman (uncredited) attempts to sell a copy of Cahiers to Michel on the street, saying "Monsieur, do you support youth?" He angrily refuses, saying "No, I prefer the old." This wealth of references was unusual at the time and was a precursor to postmodern cinema such as Pulp Fiction.

Allusions and remakes

Godard's own Pierrot le fou stars the same actor (Belmondo) and repeats phrases from Breathless (including "We are all dead men on leave" and "Allons-y, Alonso"). Otherwise the plot is very different. The film A Woman Is a Woman, which was also directed by Godard and costars Belmondo, includes a reference to Breathless. At one point, Belmondo's character says he needs to get home because Breathless is being shown on TV. A rarely seen 1976 film by Amos Poe, Unmade Beds, is an homage to and parody of Breathless. An American remake of the same name was made in 1983, starring Richard Gere and Valérie Kaprisky, directed by Jim McBride. It is set in California, and the nationalities of the protagonists are swapped: the man is American and the woman is French. Bernardo Bertolucci utilizes a scene from this film in The Dreamers. In Noah Baumbach's 2005 film The Squid And The Whale, Jeff Daniels' character Bernard recalls the last scene of the film to his wife, before being loaded into an ambulance. In the first scene of the The L Word episode "Luminous," Mia Kirshner's character, Jenny Schechter, speaks French and wears a New York Tribune T-shirt in an allusion to Patricia from Breathless.

DVD releases

Breathless has been available on DVD for several years in the English-speaking world, in editions distributed by Fox-Lorber in Region 1 and by Optimum Releasing in Region 2. In both of these releases, the film has a greenish tinge. This was removed for the Region 1 2-disc release by the Criterion Collection in 2007, which features a fully-restored image approved by director of photography, Raoul Coutard. The 2007 Criterion release is illegal for sale in Quebec, Canada because it falls under Bill 101's law that prohibits French films from being released with an English title. Criterion did not produce a French cover for the DVD release of Breathless.

Principal cast

• Jean-Paul Belmondo as Michel Poiccard
• Jean Seberg as Patricia Franchini
• Daniel Boulanger as the police inspector
• Jean-Pierre Melville as Parvulesco, the novelist
• Liliane David as Minouche
• Henri-Jacques Huet as Antonio Berrutti

Awards

• 1960 Prix Jean Vigo
• 1960 Berlin International Film Festival: Silver Bear for best director
• 1961 French Syndicate of Cinema Critics: Critics Award for Best Film

See also

• Cinema of France
• List of French language films

External links

• Breathless at the Internet Movie Database
• Alternative Film Guide review of Breathless
• Original treatment for film by François Truffaut (French)