Brooke and I saw Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960) the other night. It was my first time seeing it, though Brooke has seen it several times before, and says it’s one of her favourite films. Frankly, I had mixed feelings (though I gave it an 8 on IMDB). Some people can immediately dissect a film into its parts and can expound at length on the editing, the cinematography, the sound design, and lots of other “technical” aspects of the movie. I’ve never been able to do that, at least not upon my first viewing. I guess I have to ingest the whole before I can talk about any of the parts. And for me, the whole was somewhat unsatisfying, even disturbing.
I tried to distance myself from the obvious charms of the movie: Paris in the Sixties, exciting “French New Wave” flourishes like jump-cuts, the gorgeous Jean Seberg. And what I found was a film about two people with no souls. Michel and Patricia are completely amoral and aimless, and I could find no sympathy for them. This always makes watching a film difficult for me. And even though Brooke grudgingly agreed with me, it was still clear that she loves the film and I, well, not so much.
I was struggling to figure out whether it was just me being contrary, so I grabbed Pauline Kael’s book For Keeps off our bookshelf. Imagine my relief when I read:
I think seeing the film for the first time at the age of 39 has a lot to do with it. If I’d seen it twenty years ago, I may not have suspected that the characters are poseurs, that even the filmmaker may be a bit of a poseur. I might have mistaken their chilling soullessness for “cool” and tried to imitate it.
When I see Breathless again (and I think it is worthy of another viewing), I certainly will pay more attention to the revolutionary camerawork and editing. With the moral vacuum at the heart of the film now recognized and named, that seems to be the only place left I’d want to look.
There have been many great works of art about abominable subject matter. Art is not always dependent on empathy. Although it’s pretty damn hard without it. At the least, one usually has a narrator or foil of some sort.
Though this may sound completely far out, my main criticism of Spielberg’s A.I. was that the “characters” were not human, not even in the way that animals in fables are human. (I’ve met toasters with more character.) They were empty and meaningless and their experiences were devoid of interest. But then, they were figments, too.
The characters in Breathless are probably believable as human beings, only not the kind you would want to know. Reminds me of something like Natural Born Killers. Perhaps they spring from a similar insight.
Did you read much 18th Century at York? Was that Banerjee? Swift and Johnson portrayed no end of stuffed shirts and empty heads, though as I said, they did have narrators to empathize with. A film director can distance himself using technique in a way that would rarely occur to a writer, unless maybe to someone like Palahniuk, but at least he’s funny.
Weird. I just purchased Breathless a few weeks ago but haven’t watched it yet. Like you, I’ve never seen the movie but I’m only 35.
I’ve been watching a lot of Godard and some of the other filmakers from the French New Wave. I watched A Band Apart and Contempt and didn’t enjoy them as much as I thought I would have.
I found that watching the director commentary for Contempt explained a lot of the film that I just didn’t get from the first viewing. I was watching Kill Bill Vol. 2 and noticed a scene that Tarantino obviously borrowed from Contempt.
I’ll let you know what I think of Breathless when I’ve had a chance to watch it.