Film - Jonathan Romney on the release of Jean-Luc Godard's classic
At the wheel of his car, Michel Poiccard, a French petty gangster who fancies himself as Bogart, makes gunfire sound effects with his mouth: "Paf! Paf!" Soon after, he shoots a policeman, for no apparent reason. That is, we see him aim a gun, see the cop fall, hear gunshots on the post-synched soundtrack. It's not entirely convincing and, when the killer escapes across a field, it's entirely unconvincing - simply a young Jean-Paul Belmondo impersonating the getaway in some American thriller.
Jean-Luc Godard invented his distinctive "fake" action in A Bout de Souffle (Breathless) in 1959, and has used it ever since - in the multiple car wrecks of Weekend (1967); the slapstick scuffles of Prenom: Carmen (1983); even in the quasi-realist Balkan executions of his most recent cinema feature, For Ever Mozart (1996). However much Godard appears to confront historical or political realities, the world in which those actions take place generally seems equally artificial. For Godard, it seems, events and actions are certifiably real only once carved into the concrete, manipulable, infinitely re-readable form of celluloid or videotape.
Over the past decade, those media and their encoded memories have captivated Godard far more than the happenstance business of real people in real space. He still occasionally makes fictions for the cinema, but his central project of the Nineties was the video series Histoire(s) du Cinema, an intricate, fluid collage of texts, soundtracks and sampled footage. Histoire(s) is less a documentary on film history than an extemporisation on film as a vehicle of memory; it's also a model of Godard's own unconscious. More than one critic has compared latter-day Godard to James Joyce, and Histoire(s) to Finnegans Wake, as an unfathomable, inexhaustible text that will reward anyone willing to take the time and learn to read it.
Godard kicked off Cannes this year with a short called On the Origin of the 21st Century - another inscrutable assemblage in the Histoire(s) vein. Surprisingly, it included a clip of Jean Seberg drawing her thumb across her lips as she stares into the camera - the final shot of Breathless, and as unlikely as finding an entire paragraph of Dubliners stitched into Finnegans Wake. And anyone who wishes - as some apparently do - that Godard had carried on making films like Breathless might as well dream of a Joyce who went on writing vignettes of life on the Liffey.
If we feel nostalgic watching the re-released and re- subtitled Breathless, it's partly out of knowledge of the paths that Godard didn't take subsequently (unlike his contemporaries Francois Truffaut and Claude Chabrol, who made their own peace with the mainstream), and knowledge of the forbidding formal and ideological byways that he did explore, hardly any of which are predictable from his debut. It's possible to hate everything Godard later became yet still love this film: some people insist that the rest was sorry decline, if not the beginning of the end for European cinema.
It's true that Breathless is the only Godard film that can be easily remarketed for our decade's culture, as a style movie: even in 1988, when it was previously released here, the poster proclaimed it "seriously stylish" and "outrageously sexy". You can't argue - time hasn't dimmed the erotic charge of Seberg's neck or Belmondo lounging in his shorts. As for the style, it goes beyond the baggy jackets, the Herald Tribune T-shirt, the thrill of imported Thunderbirds and Oldsmobiles over dumpy Peugeots. But it might be better to say "stylishly serious", because the film demonstrates how modern meaning and action emerge out of style. Words, too, are determined by commercial circulation: at a press conference for a celebrity novelist (played by the great policier director Jean-Pierre Melville), whatever he has to say is reduced to a barrage of soundbites. Godard took up the challenge and became a master of telegraphic sloganeering.
Similarly, from style comes a new morality. Conventional moral meaning is emptied out: Poiccard's random killing seems no more serious than a bit of tough-guy posturing; when Patricia shops him to the police, it seems less a real betrayal and more a generic tragic gesture. Significantly, Godard himself plays the informer who spots Poiccard in the street. Betrayal has become less a moral issue than a stylistic one - it's essential in the modern world to change sides when expedient and, as a film-maker, to betray your models even while copying them. Breathless is as much an assassination as a celebration of the American B-movie. As much a role-player as Poiccard himself, Godard has continued to stake everything on a series of postures, versions of his original stance as a firebrand critic - pop-culture archivist, hardline ideologue, rogue sociologist and, more recently, hermit obituarist for a dying art form.
To see Breathless now is inevitably to yearn for a lost world in which real Paris and cinematic Frenchness seemed equally rich in utopian possibilities (the tragedy of the Nouvelle Vague, you might say, is that it realised so many of those possibilities so fast). Yet to entertain that nostalgia is tantamount to the kind of cultural tourism that Breathless implicitly disparages by including stock footage of well-known Paris locations. Ah, the skirts, the Gauloises, the Place de la Concorde by night - fair enough, but this Paris is undermined by a surreptitious fictional assault that infiltrates its reality. At one point, a headline about the Poiccard case flashes up on a real illuminated news display on a real building. Godard didn't just film the streets, but colonised them for the new cinema. His colleague Jacques Rivette called his own 1960 debut feature Paris Nous Appartient (Paris Belongs to Us) - not just an expression of freedom, but a declaration of war on the reality of the city.
The city still belongs to them, for better or worse - it's impossible to see any film set in Paris today without remembering that Godard's generation still holds the land deeds. Breathless marks the moment when the Nouvelle Vague took the city's everyday banality and turned it into one big set for acting out cops and robbers, star-crossed lovers or doomed revolutionaries. The irony is that, thanks to Godard and his generation, it's never quite been a real city since.
Breathless (A Bout de Souffle) (15) is currently being screened at the Curzon Soho, the Gate, the Screen on the Hill and the Clapham Picture House, London
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