“New York Herald Tribune!”

Plot Summary: After killing a cop with a jump cut, Jean-Paul Belmondo’s Bogart-imitating anti-hero hangs out with his American lover (Jean Seberg).

Review:

Breathless is invariably the first film that leaps to mind whenever the subject of the French New Wave is broached, no doubt because it epitomizes the philosophy, aesthetic, and revolutionary spirit of the movement. With Breathless, Godard seemingly set out to break as many of the rules of conventional filmmaking as possible, and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he checked off a list of rules as he broke them one by one:

• Replace glossy cinematography with raw natural lighting - Check
• Replace polished studio sets with gritty location shooting - Check
• Replace editing continuity with abrupt jump cuts - Check
• Replace scripted dialogue with spontaneous improvisation - Check
• Replace establishing and transition shots with disorienting ellipses - Check
• Replace smooth camerawork with shaky hand-held photography - Check
• Replace clear-cut narratives with ambiguity - Check

Shouldn’t there be a law against breaking so many rules? Indeed, the real rebel of Breathless is not Belmondo, but Godard himself, whose intentionally disruptive editing and camera styles, which deliberately call attention to themselves in order to remind the viewer he’s watching a movie, expose the illusion of reality created by the use of unobtrusive cinematic techniques in the conventional filmmaking process. In this way, Godard is rather like a magician revealing how a trick is performed to his audience.

Though the plot of Breathless is hardly remarkable, Godard’s radical reworking of film form certainly is, and the result is a groundbreaking masterwork that remains as exhilaratingly fresh and alive today as it must have been in 1960. Watching Breathless makes you feel the liberating joy of the iconoclastic artist slipping the restrictions of convention.

Posted on September 28th, 2008 by Mat Viola
Filed under: Reviews