Breathless (1960) [The Criterion Collection] – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray Combo

À bout de souffle
****/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+
starring Jean Seberg, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Van Doude, Jean-Luc Godard
written and directed by Jean Luc Godard

by Walter Chaw Jean-Luc Godard is punk, and Breathless is his Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols. If he’d only ever made this one film, it would have been enough: the sneer that launched a thousand film careers–the carbuncular adolescents gathered behind their enfant terrible king seeing a future in taking a giant piss on politesse and convention. Among the filmmakers of the Nouvelle Vague, Godard carried the flag of disaffection first and longest. Like the other young men of his generation, he was force-fed the cinema of France’s American occupiers, who flooded French theatres post-WWII with what they saw as genre detritus: B-movies and cheap melodramas, gangster flicks and westerns, tabloid movies and smoky noir provocations. France the capitulated, the humiliated, the liberated, exploited as a clearinghouse for used Yankee culture that became grist for a generational film movement that came of age having ingested it, working it through their biology in a hormonal stew then expelling it in alien tributes now fawning, now excoriating, always defiantly, well, French. What we sent to France, we got back with an experimental jazz score, a Paul Klee print, and a Sartre quote about isolation.

Breathless is about a punk–a “hypnotically ugly” one, according to Bosley Crowther in the paper of record–named Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo) who steals a car, finds a gun, and kills a couple of people in murders so stylized you can feel Godard flipping the bird at the balletic abomination of American-movie bloodlust. Death in Godard’s films is a result of bungling or accident: not ugly–anti-pretty. And the men in them who think the wielding of violence makes them sexy are Philistines and liars like Michel, who rubs his lip to affect Humphrey Bogart but manages mostly to seem like a child checking to see if his mustache is coming in yet. Michel spends most of the first part of the film trying to get American expat Patricia (Jean Seberg) into bed with embarrassing come-ons and lumpen attitudes towards the art prints and Faulkner books with which Patricia lards her tiny Parisian flat. They are the expressions of her interiors, as are all of the interior spaces we occupy and are allowed to curate–unsubtle invitations to appreciate the depths we’re trying to project. “Am I as pretty as her?” Patricia asks Michel, settling her nose in the space between the neck and chin of the subject in Renoir’s Portrait of Mademoiselle Irene Cahen d’Anvers, and he says that when she’s scared or surprised is the sexiest to him. She asks if he prefers vinyl or the radio. “Quiet, I’m thinking,” he replies, smacking her ass. “I know them all by heart,” she says, fanning through her small record collection. People are shocked when Patricia, tired of fucking Michel, turns him in, but I’m not a bit surprised. Michel is a Yankophilic footnote in an early chapter of her life; the occupation can only last so long. I doubt she remembers his name by the time she hangs up the phone. Vivre la France!

Godard has Michel shadowbox his reflection like an antelope tipping around on its hind legs before dropping off fledgling journalist Patricia at a press conference for a great author, Parvulesco. He’s making an ass of himself in this fashion just as Parvulesco arrives, resplendent in a Stetson and mirrored aviators. Parvulesco is played by Jean-Pierre Melville, referenced earlier in Breathless when Michel name-drops one of the director’s characters, failed crook and gambling addict Bob Mantagné from Bob le flambeur (1956). I’m fascinated by how Michel can be read as the manifestation of Godard’s insecurities–the fear he projects upon others, particularly former compatriot Truffaut, that beneath his defiant, punk-rock aesthetic is a scared poseur desperately yearning to be tough. You can see it, too, in one of Godard’s most vocal acolytes in the modern scene, Tarantino: the suspicion that having lived many lives through the movies doesn’t equate to the actual scar tissue accrued by war vets like Melville and Sam Fuller (whom Godard casts in Pierrot le Fou).

If we look at all of the Nouvelle Vague as an attempt to recover dignity in the aftermath of WWII, Michel represents puffery, while Patricia’s stoicism and toughness are the real deal. In Breathless, Michel and Patricia make out during Budd Boetticher’s Ranown masterpiece Westbound; Truffaut shows up as a moony-eyed father-figure exo-biologist in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Truffaut wrote the original script for Breathless, which ended with Michel finally gaining the bad-boy notoriety he’d craved throughout. Godard rewrote each day’s pages the night before and ended it with a hail of bullets as Patricia looks on, her expression initially horrified but ultimately ambivalent. It’s John Dillinger’s fate: romantic, perhaps, but, again, anti-pretty. Michel’s final moments are a series of exaggerated grimaces not unlike the death throes of the T-1000 liquid terminator at the end of Terminator 2. The simulacrum is trying on a man suit and going through its paces one last time at the moment of death. Patricia’s parting closeup is a challenge to the fourth wall as she makes the lip-rubbing gesture Michel’s been trying on for the entire film and asks the audience if this gesture means “nausea.”

There’s much to take from that, including the contextual read of Patricia wondering whether Michel’s last words are the insult that Patricia’s actions make him “want to puke.” Lately, I’m thinking of Sartre’s Nausea and its idea that life is meaningless without commitment to actions that elevate it from despair to heroism. Like Nausea, Breathless also seems to cast aspersions on the inner life of women as compared to men, a concept linked in Sartre to the Freudian idea of male sexuality being the motivating factor in civilization. I like to believe that Breathless is of the notion that because Man is capable of creating an identity for itself, the period of disconsolate existentialism most of us experience as human beings is a temporary one, a necessary bridge between adolescent angst and mature actualization. Michel rejects the pistol offered him at the end in favour of flight from the tipped-off police closing in on him but is gunned down regardless in what might be seen as a misunderstanding over his unfortunate choice to pick up the discarded weapon. Maybe Michel was growing up. Maybe his disgust at the end is because he was never given a chance to be more than this punk, too in love with the image of rebellion to understand the consequences of it. I think the lip-rubbing does mean “nausea” in the sense that Patricia is referencing our state of helplessness in mimicking ancient forms and enacting antiquated movements. Maybe it’s a refutation of Sartre’s faith in the dignity of Man’s subjective self-image, just as Breathless is a refutation of every cinema-age expression of Man’s self-image. Maybe it’s simply an impossibly beautiful girl who doesn’t care about you telling you you aren’t good enough, just as you feared.

All this says nothing of the visceral power of Breathless, the kinetic thrill of it like a cold finger drawn across the back of your neck. It’s electric, and only partially because of the hyperactive “jump” cuts Godard imposed on the piece upon being told he needed to lose 30 minutes from its running time. Rather than sacrifice whole sequences, Godard figured he’d take out any superfluous busywork. When I learned years later that James Ellroy, asked to shorten L.A. Confidential, came upon his “tabloid” style of writing by deciding he’d yank out every extraneous word from his manuscript, I thought specifically of Godard and Breathless and how both artists, Godard and Ellroy, are fervent, dyed-in-the-wool iconoclasts, enemies of the status quo while also being historians of a sort–documentarians of specific social movements and the cultures animating them. Breathless is that, though its French title, À bout de souffle, translates as the more thematically evocative–and vaguely sinister–“out of breath.” It rushes through, heedless of the niceties of plot, of not merely the pacing between scenes but even the cohesion within a scene. I love the sequence where Michel lists the parts of the girl he likes (Patricia) and Godard, locked into a shot of Seberg from the backseat of Michel’s car, cuts out the pauses, the hesitations, in his speech. The approach has all the charm Michel does not. Godard dedicated his career to expressing his barely contained contempt for others and an impatience available only to the imperiously arrogant. But his work is exhilarating. Michel is insufferable, it’s true, yet he’s uncomfortably familiar as the part of ourselves that dreams and wakes disappointed, so he’s precious because of it. They trail between them, creator and creation, the frustrations we have for intransigent sons dedicated to making their own mistakes to spite the wisdom offered by the well-meaning and the wise. You wish they’d grow up, but you gotta admire the chutzpah.

And then there’s Patricia. The doomed Seberg sought stardom as a cornfed 17-year-old Iowa farmgirl and was ripped apart and reconstituted: paired off to a quartet of the wrong men, prominent on the side of the Black Panthers (thus earning the attention and ire of America’s secret police), and dead at 40 by her own hand. She’s still a child here at 22 but already damaged goods in Hollywood after two high-profile Otto Preminger flops, essentially playing herself hawking newspapers on the Champs-Élysées in her brassy midwestern yarl: “New York Herald Tribuuuuune!!!” It’s like fingernails on a chalkboard against Seberg’s halting, heavily accented French. It gives her an aura of strangeness. Her banter with Belmondo sounds like a 45 played at 33⅓ against his veteran auctioneer. She is at an obvious disadvantage but still holds all the power. When she asks her halting, even childish questions of the great Parvulesco, he smells blood in the water and turns his attention to her–the Great White on the trail of a seal pup. But she asks the best question, the kill shot: “What is your greatest ambition?” Parvulesco turns serious. “To become immortal,” he says, “and then die.” He takes off his shades to say this. She takes off hers to contemplate it. The more you know about Seberg, the greater the voltage that shoots through your heart at this point. She did. And then she did. Breathless is the moment she is most alive, and Godard is our greatest poet of life on the verge. He worked until his death at the age of 91, choosing to go out via assisted suicide; a family member reported that he wasn’t ill but “simply exhausted.” Breathless is one of the great feature debuts, and it’s barely among my favourite ten of Godard’s pictures. He never lost faith in film’s ability to reverse the flow of rivers and challenge the course of history. Once he started running, nothing stopped him. Nothing could.

THE 4K UHD DISC
Criterion reissues Breathless on 4K UHD disc in a dual-format release that relegates the special features to a standard Blu-ray (region-locked to A). Note that the 1.37:1, 2160p transfer, from a restoration carried out by L’Image Retrouvée, is identical to the one on StudioCanal’s UK release from 2020 (and both offer HDR enhancement in Dolby Vision and HDR10), but the bonus material is almost all exclusive to Criterion. Having grown accustomed to the DVD version, I found the 4K presentation to offer a world of improvement in terms of fine detail and shadow delineation. I want to highlight the Champs-Élysées sequence, in which it’s possible now to distinguish the individual leaves on the trees, to count the windows in the far background. HDR expands the depth of contrast without exaggerating it, while the grain is corralled with a similarly conscientious regard for preserving the movie’s naturalism. I had never noticed that the line bisecting the road starting at the 10:12 mark–which Michel and Patricia treat as a barrier once they reach it–is water, possibly spill-off from a flower vendor’s hose or something less romantic. This is how to look at Breathless. It’s beautiful. The attendant 1.0 LPCM French soundtrack is likewise above reproach, with whistle-clean dialogue and a fullness that transcends the limitations of the centre channel.

Extras launch with a block of five archival interviews: two with Godard and one each with Belmondo, Seberg, and Melville. Start with a 1960 Cannes profile of Godard (7 mins.) that finds the auteur in signature sunglasses and cardigan giving a prickly, evasive interview in which he complains about his hotel room not having been paid for and claims he’s pleased not to have the film in competition. To be fair, the interviewer is a bit of a blowhard who sets up an antagonistic encounter. He gets one, though Godard seems more impish than irritated. When asked what he’s rebelling against, Godard says he’s more just annoyed whenever he doesn’t get to do what he wants. I love when he insists he doesn’t believe cinema influences youth but that youth should be allowed to influence cinema–and adds that he’s already exhausted and hopes to disappoint future audiences so they don’t trust him anymore.

Clips from a later interview from 1964 have Godard saying he regrets the success of Breathless, citing its too-conventional storyline. Suffice it to say, I tend to hang on Godard’s every word (the only other filmmaker to match him in this regard is John Cassavetes), and he says a lot of words here. Belmondo’s Q&A (8 mins.), from 1961, sees him reflecting on how he came to know Godard, the maestro’s shooting style, and their collaborative process, which included improvisation that was later refined. He talks about his boxing career at some length, and all the while, we pretend not to notice he’s in a warehouse full of Greek statues. Another gem. Seberg’s 6-minute interview begins with a confrontational question about the inauspicious start to her career and her subsequent institutionalization. She graciously answers, blaming Preminger’s directorial style and her divorce, respectively, and it’s heartbreaking. She goes on to describe her upbringing, but she seems shaken. Brutal. Finally, Melville (6 mins.) discusses the trials of first-time filmmakers and gets philosophical about his role as a mentor to the New Wave.

A dialogue with Raoul Coutard and Pierre Rissient, produced for the 2007 Criterion release, is ported over in its entirety (22 mins.). The men portray Godard as a rebel who felt he didn’t need a story to shoot a film–who rejected narrative conventions, as a matter of fact–but, as Coutard succinctly puts it, was obsessed with ill-fated love and death. The making of Breathless is recounted from the initial collaboration with Truffaut and Claude Chabrol to Georges de Beauregard’s involvement as a producer to its shooting, editing, and distribution. Coutard credits his background as a photojournalist for his ability to shoot quickly and on location and speaks fondly of the challenge of doing everything in a new and different way. It’s a fairly standard talking-heads piece, but considering the heads–and the rich production stills interspersed throughout–it’s well worth the time investment. Likewise from 2007, D. A. Pennebaker (10 mins.) addresses his near-collaboration with Godard and their attempts to produce something balanced on the line between fiction and documentary. There’s footage here of Godard, in English, directing what should be “real” and what was to be “faked.” Pennebaker says it didn’t make any sense to him, but he was “cool” with following Godard’s lead.

A video essay, Seberg (19 mins.), courtesy From the Journals of Jean Seberg filmmaker Mark Rappaport, explores the glory of Seberg’s face, specifically how it’s captured in Breathless. It’s a lovely piece, although by this point one begins to tire of seeing the deck of iconic Seberg images get shuffled around. Regardless, this is the first time I recognized Nicole Kidman’s performance in Birth as something like a tribute to Seberg’s in Breathless. Rappaport dives deep into the final, legendary close-up of the film, and I was entranced. Jonathan Rosenbaum chimes in with “Breathless as Criticism” (11 mins.), breaking down not merely the film but Godard’s and the New Wave’s oft-stated intention to have their work function as auto-critique of cinema’s history as well–the element that ties the movement, I think, to Quentin Tarantino’s obsession with it. Rosenbaum goes into the movie’s reflexivity and singles out a few key visual tropes. It’s not bad, just a little broad.

A feature-length documentary called Chambre 12, Hotel de Suede (80 mins.) is a 1993 piece by French TV host Claude Ventura that plays out as an obsessive fan’s attempt to track down all the shooting locations for Breathless thirty-three years on. He interviews Coutard in the back of a taxi, ensnares Belmondo for a quick few words, and frames his nerdiness like a police procedural, complete with photos pinned to his hotel wall and dramatic shots of him stalking well-travelled streets. Undoubtedly self-indulgent, it’s not without value, if only for the precious glimpses of various contracts, notes, and letters dating back to the production. I guess I’m an obsessive fan, too. The highlight of the supplements, though, is the inclusion of Godard’s 1959 short film Charlotte et son Jules (13 mins.), a.k.a. Charlotte and Her Boyfriend, starring Belmondo and Anne Collette and shot entirely in a hotel room by DP Michel Latouche, Godard’s first choice to shoot Breathless. Point of interest: Godard himself dubs Belmondo’s dialogue in an ultimate and literal act of directorial ventriloquism. It’s essentially an insecure jerk dressing down a girl who’s too good for him as she dispassionately eats an ice cream cone. The seeds of the rest of Godard’s career are planted here, deep, in a piece more bemused than amused, more vicious and irritated than pacific and crowd-pleasing. When I watch Godard, I think of Sex Pistols; it’s a compliment. A vintage trailer for Breathless (2 mins.) rounds out the disc’s presentation, featuring short clips from the flick and declarative subtitles incanted by a woman offscreen: “Death, the novelist, the man, Marseilles, Humphrey Bogart.” It’s wry and hilarious and would’ve had me in line on opening night.

A thick booklet accompanies the discs, featuring Dudley Andrew’s marvellous 2007 essay “Breathless Then and Now.” Celebrating its insouciance, Andrew places the film in context with the New Wave (“Already well underway”) while identifying its post-modern callbacks to all that came before. He mentions the “moral fatigue” and anxiety of the picture, the product of its mise en scène and staccato editing. Most importantly, he captures the picture’s boundless, bottomless joy. This is the best kind of movie writing for my tastes and interests. Bravo. Also included are Godard’s 1959 essay on the revolution represented by The 400 Blows competing at Cannes (“The first young movie”), Truffaut’s first treatment for Breathless, and excerpts from Godard’s original scenario, which lays out the action as a short story of a kind. It’s a fascinating document of a confounding creative process in its nascence.

90 minutes; NR; UHD: 1.37:1 (2160p/MPEG-H, Dolby Vision/HDR10), BD: 1.33:1 (1080p/MPEG-4); French 1.0 LPCM; English subtitles; BD-100 + BD-50; UHD: Region-free, BD: Region A; Criterion