On A List of Movie Reviews
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À bout de souffle (1960)
Rate:
10
Viewed:
9/15, 5/20
9/15:
Enormously influential, Jean-Luc Godard's first major motion picture À bout de souffle, which is
better known as Breathless, isn't anything special.
Mostly, what I see is the avant-garde editing (aka jump cuts). There's a nice scene of Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg walking
on the streets of Paris while the others are surprised to see them. Not much of a plot occurs. The continually improvised script
is painfully evident during many conversations with the bedroom scene dragging out for a long while.
Jean-Paul Belmondo plays a highly engaging character who might be the biggest chain-smoker ever, but he's the loser type who
can't stop touching his lips in a strange way. A pretty face with an iconic haircut that came way, way before Mia Farrow, Jean
Seberg isn't interesting enough to care about. Her character is one-dimensional, but she makes for eye candy by hanging
around Jean-Paul. Sadly, life left Jean Seberg literally breathless as she committed suicide at age 40.
All in all, the hype of À bout de souffle, a prime example of the French New Wave, may have been built up too much
for me, so I'll have to view it again later.
5/20:
One of the greatest films in French cinema, À bout de souffle immortalized Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg
forever.
The first time I saw it, I didn't have a strong favorable opinion, and now, I begin to see why it's a remarkable motion
picture. Yes, the jump cuts are famous and many classic scenes are seemingly improvisational, but there's a James Dean quality
that's exercised by the current thespians: infinite flexibility. It doesn't happen much in films.
Actors have a limited space to move around in because they work with marks on the ground. It's easy to tell they've rehearsed
the scene plenty of times, but in À bout de souffle, the rules of movement are thrown out of the window.
On the other hand, the dialogue somewhat sucks, yet Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg look so cool that they're
beyond fault. Hence, it's a timeless movie.
What's interesting about Michel is he, who's although a pathological liar, an inveterate chain-smoker, and a cop killer with ADHD
tendencies, seems perfectly at ease. Now, that's what I call a sociopath. Living in the fast lane, he was bound to die
sooner or later. Of course, Jean Seberg's character is totally attracted to his bad boy persona. By the way, the writer who's
interviewed is Jean-Pierre Melville, the director of Le samouraï and
L'armée des ombres.
All in all, À bout de souffle is as fresh and new as it was in 1960.