So we get hustling, manipulating, scheming and a lot of philosophising as the project takes shape with rising stars and one bona fide Hollywood actress, a script by established Nouvelle Vaguer Francois Truffaut, and funding enough for a tight ninety minute thriller. But from Jour Un, Jean Luc has other plans which are a mix of get the basic thing done and do what he feels like at the time. But is the auteurism he's been promoting in his journalism a real thing or just ego? Is his dismissive treatment of the creative input of Jean Seberg just more old guard or genuinely sup par to the genius of Godard?
There are many more talking points and your answers will vary depending on your knowledge of this cine-history and how you consider the portrayal of the characters (particularly Godard and Seberg). This loving and brassy tribute to the film and what it did to the spirit of the Nouvelle Vague will either engage you consistently or leave you wondering why anyone cared, now or then.
Indy Royalty Richard Linklater, himself the author of audacious films among the more conventional, clearly elevates Godard as a figure. If anything, it's the figure rather than the person flailing at that eminence. So much of Godard's dialogue feels drawn from his writing or interviews. The former is the more fiery and the latter more caged and difficult. Jean Luc Godard really did make a banged-out noir in Breathless and he realy did subvert it with jump cuts and subversions of convention and when you see it for the first time you well might marvel at seeing tropes for the first time they happened on screen. The movie is the work of a concentrated mind who carried his practice with discipline. The whimsical contrarian we see here is more a wich fulfilment than a figure from history.
But that's not a problem when you pit Linklater's own practice against Godard's and understand the strength of the umbillical at play. Linklater's movies don't really resemble Godard's but there is a clear likeness in the certainty behind them. For all the seeming formlessness of films like Slacker or Dazed and Confused, the sprightly invention of the Before series or Waking Life, he is more contemporary and more American. His tribute is not a thanks for technique but pluck and resolve.
I did appreciate the avoidance of a historical story that refused to shoehorn the names of famous people into the dialogue. When depictions appear, the actors characters are subtitled clearly for us to recall or forget according to what we will. I will admit that I thought Suzanne Schiffman was meant to be Anges Varda (the real instigator of the Nouvelle Vague, btw) but it's clear who is meant to be who. Some of the face casting for this is marvelous: the lookalikes for Truffaut, Bresson, and Cocteau are pretty fine. There is a coda about what they did next but this is more subdued than the usual where you might get images of the real people filling the screen, as though you can't Google them yourself. Better than that, I guess.
So, what do we have here? Linklater's celebration of cinema as blank screen for exploration could have chosen few equal or better examples of resroucefulness and innovation than this one. If he lets the notoriously difficult Godard off the hook by making him an agent of chaos as a kind of goofy ancestor he also suggests that the difficulty of making cinema has always been there and the few breaks for freedom are to be treasured then' "Bravo!" But I wonder.
I wonder, for example, if this conscientiously 35mm film production might not have felt more suversive itself if it had been shot on UHD digital video. Godard sang the praises of the accessibility of the analogue video of the '70s and '80s. Losing the dress-up of film grain (and even black and white) might have made the tribute of it all the more sincere by that observation.
Do we need more cinephiles praising Breathless? It's like the Unknown Pleasures T-shirt of the cinema world, the universal brand qualifier that those who touch it never need to experience for themselves. You want to really celebrate indy filmmaking and its impact on mainstream cinema? Tell the story of making Night of the Living Dead. A bunch of antsy advertisers cobbling a no budget game changer in defiance of their own lifestyle. It's less comfortable but it could hit home harder.
As an undergrad in the early '80s, I was as wowed as anyone by Godard. I smoked then, and more than I'd like to admit, smoked Gitanes or Gauloises if a shop offered them. I tired my coffee black (too young, didn't work) and foraged around for as much French as I'd forgotten from school. In perparing for seminar papers and essays on Godard, I would test my ideas with flow charts and once, delivering a seminar half joked by leaving out the second syllable of his surname. But Breathless, to me, once seen, felt like a fun first album in a career that, in its first decade, went rapidly from cute art house to violent, radical and anti-conventional. Those are the titles I think of first when thinking of Godard: Weekend, Tou va bien and, at the very top, the extended essay of life in consumerworld Two or Three Things I Know About Her. Breathless feels like a square in an old Valhalla calendar after them. And Godard (as admitted in the coda of this film) did not stop developing and confronting in the decades afterward.
But this is really beside the point. If you want to bring the kids to Shakespeare, find the easiest one and let them have at it. It took a little while after the advent of high quality home video on DVD for the Godard back catalogue to appear but it eventually recieved deluxe treatment and when I bought into that and watched them again I was again exilharated by what I saw and felt. So, ok then, 's a good film.
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