Breathless : Classic (ABC At The Movies w/ David Stratton & Margaret Pomeranz)

Review by Margaret Pomeranz

This week's classic is BREATHLESS. Michel Poiccard, JEAN-PAUL BELMONDO, a petty criminal, steals a car in a coastal town and finds a gun in the glove compartment. He shoots a policeman who stops him en route. In Paris he tries to get hold of some money while resuming his relationship with Patricia, JEAN SEBERG, an American who sells copies of the Herald Tribune on the Champs Elysses.
Arguably, Jean-Luc Godard's A BOUT DE SOUFFLE, made in 1959, was the most original first feature since CITIZEN KANE or THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER. Godard was one of a group of French cinephiles, a group that included Francois Truffaut, Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer, who had all written about film in the magazine Cahiers du Cinema. Godard himself said that with BREATHLESS he referenced scenes from the Hollywood films he admired - from directors like Samuel Fuller, Nicholas Ray, Otto Preminger and George Cukor.
Belmondo's amoral crim is patently inspired by Humphrey Bogart, while Jean Seberg was cast in what Godard claimed was a continuation of her role in Preminger's BONJOUR TRISTESSE. Godard threw out the rule book with this film; his characters break the fourth wall and address the camera, there are jump cuts, controlled hand-held camera: the director was taking the familiar story from a Hollywood B movie and filming it as though the cinema had just been invented - he even dedicates the film to Monogram Pictures, the lowest of Hollywood's poverty row studios. Banned in Australia for years because of its alleged immorality, BREATHLESS is an astonishing film - rough, abrasive, seemingly improvised and casual - it still radiates a strange charm thanks to the magnetism of Belmondo and Seberg. Jean-Pierre Melville, who plays Parvelscu, the visiting intellectual interviewed by Patricia, was a French director influenced by Hollywood thrillers and much admired by the New Wave directors.
BREATHLESS took my breath away when I saw it in London in 1961; when I arrived in Australia and found it was banned here I became a rebel with a cause.
DAVID: Margaret?
MARGARET: It's unbelievable. If ever there is an argument against censorship it's this film being banned.
DAVID: Well, it was criminal.
MARGARET: For goodness sake really.
DAVID: It was criminal because this was the film that changed cinema.
MARGARET: Well...
DAVID: And a whole generation of Australian filmgoers couldn't see it.
MARGARET: Yes. Yes. I saw it many, many years later and I revisited it again recently and it's interesting looking at it again and thinking that, in 1959 it was - it took everybody's breath away. It's almost like a feral film in a lot of ways. It's sort of like he's constantly making phone calls to no avail. He's constantly buying newspapers. He's stealing cars. The number of cars in that film is just unbelievable. Usually they're American tanks. It's sort of like it's bizarre. That bedroom scene between the two of them, where they talk about nothing for at least 25 minutes, it's absolutely bizarre and wonderful and you can see...
DAVID: But it's so charismatic.
MARGARET: Yes.
DAVID: Yes.
MARGARET: But the way it's shot too. The way it embraces the streets of Paris and Raoul Coutard, who shot it, said that they never had permission for any of the stuff they shot on the streets of Paris.
DAVID: No.
MARGARET: It was really bushranger filmmaking.
DAVID: Yes, absolutely. Yes.
MARGARET: And obviously low budget but full of some strange joie de vivre. I don't know and anarchy and, oh, it's wonderful. It's wonderful.
DAVID: Yes. Well, it certainly changed my film-going life.
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List of films still banned in Australia