It’s hopeless at
this point to try saying anything new about Godard’s Breathless, and yet of all
films it still feels like the one that might most be written about, or rather
responded to, whether in words or celluloid or gestures or dreams, still in
possession of a space all its own, where established orders of classical cinema
and post-war American exceptionalism and gender relations and social
correctness are in their different ways teetering or fraying or morphing, to be
abandoned or appropriated depending on their adaptability. One could rhapsodize
over every moment, but the dying run of Jean-Paul Belmondo’s Michel is as worth
singling out as any – a defiantly absurd cinematic flourish, but with real life
(or “real life”) all too
obviously continuing on each side of the street, people going about their business
apparently oblivious to, or unmoved by, the
gorgeous history-making charade taking place within feet of them, and yet
preserved for posterity whether they know it or
not, a moment of their life rendered transcendent even as they looked the other
way. One could speak of so much of the movie in similar terms – it shimmers
with a constant sense of delighted experimentation, of trying poses and
attitudes on for size, of relishing the sound of new words and the look of new
faces, of creating and immediately fully occupying fresh cinematic space, of
happy accidents (the resonances attaching to Jean Seberg prime among them). One
almost feels protective of her and the movie, knowing that Godard would so
quickly move on – for all Michel’s immense charisma (and Belmondo here is one
of the all-time great alluring screen presences, and he and Seberg one of
cinema’s all-time fascinating couples), he expresses himself worn out by the
film’s end, ready to yield if circumstances would have allowed (if a friend
hadn’t thrown him a gun), a capitulation that seems like Godard’s own
acknowledgement of territory already defined and conquered.
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