Home     How It Works    Previews    Writings    Reviews     Students    Programs    e-mail us!

A Bout de Souffle (BREATHLESS)

Starring Jean-Paul Belmondo; Jean Seberg; dir: Jean Luc Godard


Few films evoke such a diverse range of responses in viewers. A Bout de Souffle has been described as everything from road movie, gangster revisionism, pro and anti-American, pre-cursor of both Woody Allen’s monologues and the Swedish ‘dogma’ school, "a Gallic shrug" (I like that) and a textbook of cool. I hew to the last of these interpretations, as its strongest impact for me each viewing has been its capturing, from the inside (hence its authenticity), that period of life as a young twentysomething in the inner city and its associated doomed Romanticism: narcissistic, irresponsible, solipsistic and self-absorbed. Early Godard seemed obsessed with such youthful Romantic ennui, still going strong in 1964’s A Bande a Part.

What’s new to say about a film so obsessively picked-over and scrutinised? Well, for starters the notorious jump cuts seem barely perceptible today and hardly raise an eyebrow. More striking are the continuous intrusions of passersby during the extensive location shooting, underlining how improvised was the shoot. And sorry, but how many American cars are there in Paris, really? Yank tin was a feature of Jean-Pierre Melville’s later French thrillers since he used them as mise-en-scene; here their ubiquity just seems OTT.

Scholars will rightly catalog the numerous shots of ‘looking’ (epitomised for me by the shot late in the film of Belmondo’s shades with one lens missing) as antedeluvian post-modernism. Very Godard, they make a nice counterpoint to the ‘looking’ pedestrians as the camera wheels by.

Whatever. If the film works for you (and for many it doesn’t), its appeal will come from the heart, through its peculiarly French cocktail of cynicism and Romanticism, rather than the intellect (where it largely lives on today). Where were you at 22?

- Roger Westcombe