Breathless (no stars)

Somewhere toward the end of 1951, I was having drinks with John Huston at the Brown Derby while talking about a movie we were putting the finishing touches on called the African Queen when a writer from a new French magazine interrupted us.

Francois Truffaut at the time was a film critic for a French publication called Cahiers du Cinema, a sheet that would unfortunately become quite influential. This was before Francois came out with his famous auteur theory, but the young journal still had some clout. Cahiers just came out with their top ten movie list for 1951 and I spent much time making fun of them. The list was ridiculous. Diary of a Country Priest was ranked two and Sunset Boulevard chimed in at eight.

What? Never heard of Diary of a Country Priest? The title pretty much explains the plot, except it should say Diary of a Dying Country Priest to be complete, I guess. I have a personal rule-of-thumb. If I ever have to use the word microcosm to describe a movie, it’s not good. Of course, ol’ Francois said Diary was a microcosm of the universal struggles of human kind. Yep, bring the kids.

Francois and the guys took Cahiers (and everything else) seriously and didn’t take too kindly to my constant criticisms and we started to debate the issue. I was a little loaded at this point and began to resort to my trademark caustic humor. As misguided as he is on just about everything, Francois does have a temper and this potentially intellectual debate quickly deteriorated into something unpleasant.

Here’s the odd thing. If you read Truffaut’s and Jean-Luc Godard’s theories and compare them to my ideas, we aren’t too far off. I’m all for the auteur theory which stipulates that the director’s vision must be what you watch on the screen and this is coming from a screenwriter. I’ve often deferred to Johnny during the making of African Queen and never had a problem doing things his way.

Truffaut and Godard love Hitchcock and Hawks. So do I.

Our differences can be seen in the final product. They believe in making film for the sake of making film – no story necessary. I see film as the highest form of story-telling and all tools in the movie making process should be utilized in telling the story with all of the clarity and emotion necessary to fulfill the director’s vision.

I also believe films should be entertaining. Have you ever watched a film and said “that was a nice shot” or “that was a nice cut.”? Probably not. If the final product is not entertaining, no one will see it and then what’s the point.

This is how our discussion should have gone. I believe the confrontation was my fault and in retrospect I feel guilty. I should have debated Francois with the merits of my argument because there is no question in my mind that I’m right. To prove my point, I will take one of the French New Wave masterpieces and dissect it. The movie I’m choosing is Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless which is the grandfather of the New Wave.

Allow me to make a quick concession here before someone else realizes it. Bosley Crowthers panned this movie for the New York Times. He also panned Diary. But he’s still a clown because his reviews focused on trivial complaints like Jean Paul Belmondo’s physical appeal in Breathless or that he was “confused” (not hard) in Diary. My problem with both is that they are not referential enough to the medium and only desire to show what they can do with a camera. Anyone can do that. Utilizing the camera and the moviola to make them part of the story – that takes talent.

Roger Ebert has written that Breathless was the most influential movie since Citizen Kane. To be more precise, this movie influenced the most influential movie since Citizen Kane – Bonnie and Clyde (which Bosley also panned). It is the difference between those two movies that makes my point as to why the French New Wave is trivial.

Watch the scene where Bonnie and Clyde die. There were dozens of cuts during that sequence, but those cuts quickened the pace to the scene and added a sense of desperation. There was a point to the technique. Breathless was one of the earliest movies to rely that heavily on the jarring edits that director Arthur Penn used so effectively in Bonnie and Clyde, but those edits not only do not add to the story, they take away from it. The cuts actually serve as a distraction to the viewer.

The plot in Breathless is really nothing. Belmondo (who is actually a talented actor) plays a Bogart-worshipping thief that shot a policeman and is hiding out at his American girlfriend’s (Jean Seberg) apartment. They spend most of the movie avoiding the police and hanging out in her bedroom. Breathless is basically homage to American film actors and movies while showing the difference between the old and the new. It’s a movie about movies basically with the actors using certain mannerism that were made famous in other films.

Okay, I needed a break here in order to drink a few martinis.

I’m ready.

I’ve been trying to avoid this, but I really have no choice when talking about this movie. Breathless is an early reference to post-structuralism where a character is not a person, but an archetype of something larger. This is a New Wave standard. In post-structuralism, the idea of a single meaning also extends to the story as well where it is considered more important what the viewer thinks, then what the auteur intends.

Sounds like fun, huh?

The fact that I had to go through that stupid description is everything that is wrong with Breathless and the New Wave. Great directors get their points in almost subconsciously while entertaining the viewer. There is nothing about the previous paragraph that is entertaining.

Film is such a powerful medium that it can be the highest form of human communication, but a movie like Breathless is no better than any Steven Segal movie because both experiences are mind-numbing and nothing comes across. Both are just exercises. All Godard is saying is that he likes films. This is fine.

What isn’t fine about Godard and his buddies is that people not only take them seriously, but look down on others who have a differing view. For those contrarians out there, take heart, they don’t get more intellectual than me and I can’t make it to the end of Breathless. Not because I can’t, but because Godard hasn’t shown me why I should.