Waiting To Inhale
After all these years, Godard's masterpiece still takes your breath away.

BREATHLESS (A BOUT DE SOUFFLE)
With Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean Seberg
Written by Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard

IN 1959, WITH WESTERN CULTURE on the brink of a revolutionary decade that would sweep youth culture to the fore, a 29-year-old filmmaker exhaled a breath heard 'round the world.

He and his young friends at Cahiers du Cinema, a French magazine devoted to film, had long railed against "a certain tendency in the French cinema" toward dull sentimentality. And so with Breathless, Jean-Luc Godard set a new standard of film art and pioneered a kinetic visual style that international filmmakers would soon embrace.

So much has been written about Breathless and its creator that there's little left to say. But even now, after 40-plus years, Godard's seminal New Wave film is edgy and exciting to watch, both a hint of what would come in the cinema and a throwba ck to the things Godard revered. For ultimately Godard's drama pays tribute to the Hollywood B-movies that the Cahiers critics idolized, and about which they developed grand theories of cinema authorship.

You can see it and hear it from the moment Breathless begins. We first glimpse of Michel - the charming, well-dressed petty criminal played by Jean-Paul Belmondo in the role that launched his career - with a cigarette dangling from his mouth and a fedora pulled low on his forehead. He's a tough guy, like the ones created by Monogram Pictures - the American mini-studio of the '30 and '40s to whom Godard dedicates Breathless - and the bouncy, ubiquitous jazz music on the soundtrack makes h im ultra-cool.

For a full five minutes after that it's all Michel as he drives around in his car, on the run from the police, singing and talking with himself about his own coolness, scoping chicks by the side of the road and deciding they're too homely to pick up. He p lays "pow-pow" in his rearview mirror with the gun he keeps in his glove compartment. Then, a cop catches up to him, and in a bloodless moment of violence so swift that the camera barely has time to catch it, Michel is a murderer looking for a place to hi de.

Necessity leads him to Patricia (Jean Seberg), an America girls he holds esteemed among his Parisian harem. She says no-thanks to a night in bed, but he breaks into her apartment anyway and lounges around in his underwear for a long scene (24 minutes) of small talk about their existential dilemmas. Meanwhile, he's pursued by a steely detective (Daniel Boulanger), another of Godard's tributes to the American movies he loved.

"I don't know if I'm unhappy because I'm not free," Patricia tells a rival lover, whom Michel wants her to give up, "or if I'm not free because I'm unhappy." It's the kind of conundrum that would ultimately fascinate Godard and his art beyond the brink of esoterica, but its power in Breathless comes from simply asking the question.

Seberg, a troubled expatriate waif who would die by her own hands at the age of 40, brings a fragile wordliness to her role, and the lean handsome Belmondo speaks his dialogue in a quick flat voice that conveys Michel's detachment, and which became a la mode in French cinema. So despite its energy and youth, Breathless is a dispirited film about a world where happy endings only happen in movies, and where betrayal brings tragedy on a sunny afternoon as busy Paris goes on barely even noti cing.

Godard films Breathless with a style somewhere between revolutionary and pensive (which he would become in his dense, intellectual art films beginning in the mid-1960s). On the one hand, he seems to place little emphasis on anything, yet at the s ame time some of Breathless languishes in its patience. He uses jump cuts to condense time - and to make the drama seem to move more quickly than it does. But Breathless has always been propelled as much by its brooding psychological ene rgy, and also by its thrilling, generous, black-and-white travelogue of Paris as Michel wanders around the city to his destiny.

Death happens in Godard's milieu in less than the moment it takes to breathe in and out. And so his title assumes another meaning, not one of exhaustion but of sinister finality. If there's a sadder movie about love and death than Francois Truffaut's Jules and Jim (1961) then it hasn't yet been made. But in 1959 we had the shock and delight of Breathless, a work so seminal that it still breeds offspring today, most of them bastards, but kin nonetheless.