Godard : Breathless

 

Almost gave up on the film right at its erotic climax. The story and mood were as inane as pornography - though the lovers conjoin beneath covers so it’s not x-rated . I couldn’t care less about what happens to them. Utterly amoral, the swaggering French beau does whatever he feels like, carelessly living from moment to moment. His American girlfriend is almost as bad, but she’s ten years younger - moving to Paris and the Sorbonne to explore how it feels to have an adult brain in an adult body. 

 And yet - well it is a beautiful film, full of light and space and energy, enhanced with a breezy, jazzy soundtrack. And it’s such a love letter to America, our cars, girls, movies and music. Gives me a patriotic tingle. 

 Being conquered is one kind of national humiliation- but even worse is being liberated - and somehow a reaction to that is being played out here. Our French antihero’s wartime experience was sneaking up to shoot German sentries. The loyal companions who try to help him in the end must have been his old comrades. Why else want to help such a goof? Meanwhile his sometime journalist American girlfriend is covering a great parade celebrating Eisenhower meeting De Gaulle. 

 The film seems to express a postwar malaise of humorous nihilism in France, just as “Good, Bad, Ugly” did for Italy five years later. It’s fun right from the very beginning as our antihero steals a car, brushes off his female accomplice, races through the countryside shooting his gun in the air, and then into a pesky motorcycle cop. The subject matter may be the same, but it’s the very antithesis of film noir. Nothing is sad, dark, and lurking. Yet it also feels far more like reality, avoiding a meta-narrative to attend to each emerging moment. 

 And it’s even fun in the end, as the mortally wounded criminal staggers down the street and then flops on the pavement with a dramatic flourish. The final seconds are perfect. The cop bends over to hear his last words: “this is disgusting “, then tells the girl that he said “you’re disgusting”. Nonplussed, she asks “what does disgusting mean?” Then she salutes him by imitating his signature gesture by wiping her upper lip. 

 Ah, to live free and die young. The life of a true poet. Wonder what her next boyfriend will be like. Probably not another criminal; she came much too close to losing her work permit. 

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 The action in this film is driven by the young hoodlum, but it’s mostly about the femme fatale. She’s much smarter than him and in control. She’s the intellectual, he’s the dolt. She’s enjoying her young life, he’s losing his. He’s driven by sex, she plays at it.  She’s becoming an adult. He died an adolescent