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A BOUT DE SOUFFLE
(Jean-Luc Godard, 1959)
| With Sergei
Eisenstein`s Battleship Potemkin (1925) the most celebrated film ever made,
and probably the more influential of the two, Jean-Luc Godard`s A bout
de souffle--literally, “out of breath”; in the States, irrelevantly called
Breathless—helped establish and define, for themselves and others,
the nouvelle vague—the ripping movement that stormed French cinema, overthrowing
the reigning ‘Tradition of Quality’ and its academic, refined, meticulously
crafted objets d`art. The movement denoted freedom: freedom from
the constraints of conventional, worked-through and tied-up narrative;
freedom of personal expression; the freedom of roving and penetrating inquiry—and
formally encompassing all these, a freedom of camera motion scarcely seen
since Dziga Vertov took to the streets in the ‘20s to record the pulsating
synergy of Soviet life.
These young upstarts drew inspiration from Renoir`s lifetime of personal expression, from Hollywood professionalism and (especially in screwball comedies, westerns and noirs) glints of anarchy, and from Rossellini`s use of camera—for instance, in Germany, Year Zero (1947)—as character, even the main character, rather than as mere observer. Theirs was another French Revolution, sweeping out such “royalists” as Autant-Lara and Clément, who at the time were enthroned as arbiters of filmmaking form and taste. Time doesn`t march; it sprints! Now, forty years after its arrival, A bout de souffle still astonishes; as in the case of Potemkin, its formal and technical excitement doesn`t wane. Too, the film still exerts a zinging fascination with a theme whose currency hasn`t faded: our dynamic relationship with the movies we watch. How does the interaction between us and film shape and detail us? While freeing us from some of the conventionalism of ordinary life, does it perhaps tie us to another set of conventions derived from films? Are we who we (think we) are? Or is our sense of self so informed by influences from films that who we (think we) are is a distortion we are either dimly aware of or unaware of? Another related issue is the extent to which films have so conditioned our perception of reality that we sometimes address this perception as though it were reality. We may even lose ourselves in the discrepancy between our perception and reality. Godard`s A bout de souffle
opens with Michel, a young hoodlum, standing on a street in Marseilles.
Several times throughout the film he will repeat the gesture he now makes:
in the manner of Humphrey Bogart he rubs a thumb across his lips,
Having found a gun in the glove compartment of the stolen vehicle, Michel is no one to cross. The cops are after him, and he`s run off the road. An officer approaches; Michel blows him away. The kid is not just a car thief anymore. Now he dashes across the countryside in the direction of the City of Lights. With a quick cut he is a backseat hitchhiker—this boy who, on the road, had disparaged two girl hitchhikers, refusing to stop for them. But Michel is full of tough-guy talk when it comes to girls. And now he`s a cop killer. My summary can`t do justice to this marvelous opening movement which brings into play all sorts of ideas. Plainly, Michel`s toughness is an act. But when the ‘act’ is all one has, it can settle in, take over, and determine behavior even in the worst way. Now that he has killed, moreover, there may be no chance to come across anything new out of which Michel can fashion or refashion a persona. In other words, he may be stuck with the image of himself he has taken from movies. Now his whole young life will be a mad dash until he is literally out of breath—shot dead by the police who (we know from movies) must inevitably catch up with him. There is so much here that brilliantly interprets violent adolescent behavior—especially when one extends the textbook for creating one`s persona to include venues of popular culture other than movies. There is, for me, an even
more intriguing dimension to the opening which also resonates throughout
the entire film. Godard uses the Hollywood gangster film and its
conventions to provide a powerful sense of Michel`s crisis of identity.
The
Godard may be suggesting, “In our brave new, post-Hiroshima world the old ways have blown apart; it`s a whole new movie, so don`t look to the old rules for guidance.” After all, no matter what consolation he derives from identifying with gangster movies, Michel is no gangster. His only connection to that world is a fence; certainly he belongs to no gang. How could he ever? Possibly anxious from their borrowings from the same movies, such associates might at any minute puncture Michel`s mask, his patchwork of emulation and impersonation; then where would he be? His “cool” would become fodder for their ridicule—a fate often perceived by adolescents as worse than death. Michel`s predicament is both comical and grotesque. On the one hand, by so poorly reflecting the image of a gangster the old films project Michel is effectively cut off from the genre that has formed and now feeds his posture and attitude; on the other, his continual reliance on this genre, besides likely distorting his view of reality, cuts him off as well from whatever possibilities exist that he might otherwise use to fashion another, perhaps more grounded sense of self. In this light, Michel`s situation compares unfavorably with Godard`s own. Godard can make a film, say, A bout de souffle, in order to discover—if you will, create—a sense of who he is that liberates him from the enormous influence of his filmgoing experience even while, bending it to his will, he draws from this experience; but Michel`s “self-expression,” stealing cars, is a poor substitute that in fact cannot help but deepen the rut the boy is in. May not Godard be looking at Michel and saying, “There but for the grace of making films go I”? Michel`s dream is to flee
to Italy. There, of course, he would be an immigrant. This
suggests another aspect of the `30s gangster film: denied access to the
In some ways Patricia is Michel`s mirror-image, someone incompletely formed as yet, in her case, rather than looking to films, looking to the girl in a Renoir painting poster for guidance on her own appearance. Godard stresses this mirror imaging of the two main characters by having them on a number of occasions look into one another`s eyes; the two even have a staring contest. Nevertheless, Patricia isn`t nearly so adrift as Michel. For instance, she receives money from home that helps her sustain her existence abroad. Too, she is much more articulate than Michel, whose speech amounts to repetitive schtick—one more index of his juvenile insecurity. But these differences between them helps us understand them both. Because she is more verbal, for example, she can articulate things about them both that Michel can`t (or won`t) articulate about himself. In effect, she speaks for him as well as herself. Four of her pertinent
remarks follow:
A bout de souffle projects an aching sense of wanting to know. Godard himself is trying to pierce the masks of his characters to sound out the reality, if any, that lies underneath. Patricia`s remark to Michel, “I want to know what`s behind that mask of yours,” is ironic in three ways: (1) Patricia herself often appears enigmatic; (2) it seemingly takes forever for her to decide that she loves Michel; and (3) standing over his bulleted corpse at the end, she adopts—by absorption? assimilation?—Michel`s mask, as her duplication of his Bogart lip-rubbing gesture discloses. Her earlier remark now achieves brilliant clarity; she had also meant, “I want to know what`s behind my mask.” As do we. As does Godard. In terms of his own mask. Some feel that they know what lies behind Patricia`s front: a little bitch. This misinterpretation is based on two pieces of evidence: firstly, after announcing, “I hate squealers,” rather than accompanying Michel to Italy she turns him into the police, who viciously kill him; secondly, Michel`s own dying words seem to brand her as such. However, it is a mistake to view Patricia through the convention of the femme fatale when the film as a whole probes and pierces such movie conventions. The pertinent facts in context follow. One, the girl is confused and quite undone by Michel`s lack of response when she finally does declare her love for him. Two, yes, she phones the police, because she`s in as thoughtless a rush to stay in Paris without Michel as Michel, earlier, had been to leave Marseilles without the accomplice who so obviously adored him. But she tells Michel that she has done so; it is he who tarries beyond the limit of his own safety, doubtless feeling hurt and betrayed and therefore summoning a full draught of his stupid adolescent bravado. (Make what you will of the fact that Godard himself plays the first soul to alert the police of Michel`s whereabouts.) Three, Patricia is anything but heartless when she runs out after Michel during his final foot-run from the police. Four, throughout the film, as part of his insecure mask, his inveterate “cool,” Michel has casually referred to girls as “bitches”; but his dying word, deguelasse, meaning filthy, vile, is uttered neither angrily nor bitterly but affectionately—a fact that the police (as verbally fixated, rather than visually sensitive, as some filmgoers) fail to relay to Patricia when they translate for her, as little bitch, the slang word that isn`t a part of her rudimentary French vocabulary. Five, yes, yes, the closing shot shows Patricia`s face fully reflecting her feeling that she`s damnable for what she did. So? Her capacity to feel remorse and guilt is proof of her humanity, not a lack of it. Six, c`mon, neither she nor Michel is an actual being; they`re characters in a film—and, at that, in a film whose distancing techniques constantly stress the fact. Seven, these characters are, as noted earlier, stamped with a basic likeness, a shared identity that makes them, according to the script, joint executors of Michel`s fate and joint recipients of it. Michel`s finish is Patricia`s finish, too. No wonder the image with which Godard leaves us isn`t a happy face. Patricia is no more a bitch—whatever that means—than Michel is a wanton thug. Rather, they are both in some critical sense one, making the gap between them—which Patricia`s not comprehending Michel`s dying word encapsulates—an index of their incompletion and self-dissociation. Godard is saying that movies—in general, popular culture—help to create this cognitive and emotional gap while also, in complex fashion, functioning to negotiate and bridge the gap while at the same time, adding to the complexity, widening and deepening the gap. Thus he employs techniques which give form to the dissociation—this “gap.” For instance, his use of unconventional narrative implies its discrepancy with the more conventional plot arrangements of most other films before his and since. There is also the discrepancy between how his characters behave, and why, and the relatively spelled-out ways that characters in conventional films behave. And there is another, electrifying technique that Godard employs (though doesn`t invent) towards the same suggestive end as the others—a technique with which A bout de souffle has become all but synonymous: the jump-cut. Simply stated, the jump-cut is the visual jerk that results when consecutive frames are deleted from the imaging of a continuous action within the same shot and the same scene. Indeed, this technique formally embodies all the ideas I have touched on here, and it operates, also, as a Brechtian distancing device, stressing the film`s analytical bent, by snapping us, the audience, into an analytical mode of attention. The film`s most moving shot is also its most famous: the traveling shot at his back when, bulleted by the police, Michel stumbles ahead to his end on a Paris street. Here, as elsewhere, Godard is invaluably aided by Raoul Coutard`s fresh, light, unaffected black-and-white cinematography—see, for its antecedents, Vertov`s Kino-Eye (1924) and, a greater film than even A bout de souffle, The Man with a Movie Camera (1928)—and by Martial Solal`s quick, dramatic music. But the impact of this shot, and of the death scene that follows, derives most of all from the cumulative passion of Godard`s humanistic vision and from young Jean-Paul Belmondo in his stunning, seamless, starmaking role of Michel. How good Belmondo is still with us, still adding to his remarkably wide range of roles on both stage and screen; alas, Jean Seberg! Hounded viciously to her end by J. Edgar Hoover`s F.B.I., Seberg left us long ago, at age 40. As Patricia she is terrific; like Dietrich`s Lola in Josef von Sternberg`s The Blue Angel (1930), with each fresh viewing her performance mellowingly grows in complexity and ambiguity. A bout de souffle is the one performance of hers that has since absorbed her own tragic finish, in no small part because reality, an ironist on this occasion, has seen fit to reverse her and Belmondo`s fates in the film. François Truffaut, whom we also have lost (to cigarettes, though, not politics), is credited with the film`s script; in fact, Godard himself prepared what script there was from a story idea that his friend culled from a news item. (Truffaut lent his name to give the film a professional leg up.) These two would not remain friends forever; Godard came (rightly) to believe that Truffaut betrayed the nouvelle vague by permitting his own appropriation by the bourgeois enemy, facile entertainment rather than penetrating, probing art. (There was more, too, to their falling-out.) Now Seberg`s suicide isn`t the only sadness that this first feature of Godard`s has come to absorb; for the rupture of their friendship, left permanent by Truffaut`s death at 52 (my age), the film also accommodates, driving Out of Breath`s cool, analytical beauty into the trembling heart of all of us. |
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