Breathless - Jean-Luc Godard

Jean-Luc Godard – Breathless

Breatless by Jean-Luc Godard is an interesting film done in an unusual way. I like a French film where the French language is used as well as English. I like the French language because it is softer and more poetic than English and it fits with the Paris setting and the sort of ambivalent poetic world the film pictures. But on the other hand the nice French - English pronuncation of the heroin is charming as well as her use of English time to time to express herself precisly.

The Breatless is a lively and exhlirating film. The shots in the film are immediate. Natural settings, natural light and sounds are in the film. The heroes (Michel and Patricia) seem as if they had, on the spur of the moment, decide to do what they did. The are sometimes silly but very spontaneously. The jump cuts used in the film make the film progress very quickly. The film actually follows just two days of life of Michel and Patricia. The jump cuts originally construct time. It is primarily the originality, experiement and the self-reflexiveness which are typical for the French „Noveau Wave“. Godard as experiments for example with use of some Hollywood clichés, however in different, new way. Michel for example is an admire of Bogart and of the American cars, movies and woman. As a contrast he is in a way „Frenchly“ romantic. Godard mix up characters – Michel, Bogart. Michel often in the film makes the Bogarts gesture – thumb on his lips. The focus of the film is not the story however an instantenous experience.

When I think about the two heros it seems that Patricia´s story is linked to Michel only by the dialogues and by their images being linked together. That there is nothing „big“ connecting them.


As Godard says: „ criticism taught us… to make films from a certain perspective, and to know, that if something has already been done there is no point doing it again“

In my opinion Godard makes a film in a way as a cubist artist: he cuts pieces (jump cuts) and put them together again to make his own new picture of the reality or thing he wants to show. Godard „brings cubism into the language of film“as I have read in some review and I agree with it. In my opinion this is very clever. Godard makes a film in a special way. He is showing the viewer things that can be shown only by film that can´t be written or communicated in any other form.