Jean-Luc Godard's first film is a masterpiece that startled audiences and critics when it was released and influenced the style of moviemaking as much as any film ever made.  During the 1950's, Godard and Francois Truffaut had earned a reputation as gadflies by writing articles for Cahiers du Cinema denouncing the slick, formulaic methodology of the major studios and calling for revolutionary, radical, anarchic changes in the way movies were made. When Truffaut won acclaim for his first feature film, THE 400 BLOWS (also a masterpiece), it became easier for his close associate Godard to make his own first feature. Truffaut gave Godard the basic idea for BREATHLESS and also a story treatment that Godard followed loosely, so Truffaut deserves some of the credit for the final product.

The translation of Godard's title, A BOUT DE SOUFFLE, can be misleading. In American English the word "breathless" usually means that someone is anxious or excited with anticipation. But the French title is a phrase that conveys the idea that one is out of breath because one is totally exhausted or about to expire. This is an important distinction. Godard was influenced by the fatalistic pessimism of the Beat Generation writers, and the idea of tiredness, of ennui, of being beaten down by life, is central to an understanding of the character of Godard's antihero Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo). Not that Godard aficionados agree on what constitutes Michel's character. There is disagreement about who Michel really is, just as there is disagreement about why his lover Patricia (Jean Seberg) does what she does at the end of the movie.

I have a few things to say about these two fascinating characters, but I will refrain from giving away any of the plot, simple as it is. I don't want to spoil BREATHLESS for you if you haven't seen it. Instead, I will look at the movie primarily in terms of its style, tone, atmosphere, rhythm, and technique.

If you want to enjoy BREATHLESS with your emotional sensibilities, I suggest you take it as a jazzy Beat Generation poem and lose yourself in its coolness. Godard celebrates the dark grace of the amoral loser who disdains society's rules and knows what's hip, what's copacetic, what gives him a rush, what he digs. Andrew Sarris calls BREATHLESS "the most passionate" of the New Wave films. Certainly Godard is passionate about Paris, and he lets the camera play across the beautiful, wise, warty, cruel-bitch face of the city with such obvious affection that she becomes a powerful, almost mythical presence in the background of the story. He digs Jean Seberg's face too, especially her eyes, and Jean-Paul Belmondo's face, that big caved-in boxer's nose, those endlessly expressive lips, the faint but unmistakable resemblance to Humphrey Bogart. He digs Belmondo's mannerisms, the way he rubs his lip with his thumb, the way he exhales cigarette smoke, the way he adjusts his dark glasses, the way he tips his head to look at things. Godard digs Seberg when she's wearing Michel's gangster hat over her pixie haircut. Godard also digs cars, especially the big shiny expensive American cars that Michel steals and that paradoxically represent both freedom and enslavement. And Godard really digs the slow liquid movement of upwardly curling cigarette smoke . . . the hazy beauty of it when natural light is filtering through.

Most of all Godard digs movies. He digs the luridness and raw energy and grim determinism of the Grade B crime movies made in Hollywood during the 1940's and 1950's. He digs the French film-noir director Jean-Pierre Melville and shows it by including in the dialogue two separate references to Bob the Gambler (the main character in Melville's BOB LE FLAMBEUR) and by having Melville himself play the part of a famous writer whom Patricia interviews. (Three other movie directors have bit parts in BREATHLESS - Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, and Godard himself.) Two key scenes take place inside movie theaters. Godard digs the excitement that movies can generate, the fun, the epiphany or frisson or catharsis you feel when a single image on the silver screen captures and conveys so much meaning, so much insight, so much truth that a philosopher king would need to write a thousand pages to say as much. Throughout BREATHLESS Godard incorporates dozens of such classic moments from other films, but he rarely imitates them in a precise point-for-point fashion, nor is he spoofing them (except in his depiction of the two detectives). Anyone could do that, and what would be the point? No, Godard has a higher ambition. He wants to outdo the directors of the past. He wants to take their very best moments and make them even jazzier, even cooler. The fact that he actually succeeds in doing this, a few times at least, is one reason why BREATHLESS is a great film. There are moments in it that take your breath away.

A completely different way to enjoy BREATHLESS is to turn off your emotional sensibilities, turn on your analytical scrutinizer, and study the film as an experiment in the juxtaposition of polar opposites. Consider the following examples:

BREATHLESS is spontaneous, natural, and realistic, but also contrived, artificial, and unrealistic. To give BREATHLESS spontaneity, in certain scenes Godard allowed Belmondo and Seberg to improvise their dialogue and their actions. Instead of planning camera angles in advance, Godard encouraged his cinematographer, Raoul Coutard, to be spontaneous and to move freely around the characters. To give BREATHLESS naturalness, Godard immersed his characters in genuine environments instead of using sets and extras. To keep the street scenes as natural as possible, he hid Coutard inside a mail cart so bystanders and passersby wouldn't know they were being filmed. In every scene, he insisted on natural lighting and natural background noises. (During the famous long talk that Michel and Patricia have in Patricia's room, their voices are almost drowned out twice by the siren of a passing ambulance.) As a result of these techniques, much of what you see in BREATHLESS has the look and feel of cinema verite, of documentary realism.

But at the same time, BREATHLESS is completely unrealistic. The story line is concocted almost entirely out of cliches (and classic moments) from earlier films. It is pure, unadulterated Hollywood make-believe. And Godard uses editing techniques that constantly remind us we're looking at a movie, not at reality. In some scenes he chops up a single camera shot with so many jump cuts that the image on the screen seems to be jerking forward in time. These jump cuts serve an artistic purpose, giving BREATHLESS a staccato rhythm that's perfect for Michel. Another editing technique that calls attention to itself but works nicely was borrowed by Godard from the era of silent movies. Twice the image on the screen irises out, leaving a field of black that then irises open to reveal a new image. Pure artifice!

BREATHLESS is one of the most briskly paced movies ever made, but it is also one of the most slowly paced movies ever made. The plot includes four action scenes, three of which involve violent action. Each of these scenes is so severely cut that the action lasts no more than a few seconds. Blink and you'll miss it. But there are also many conversations, and these are long and drawn out, with the longest lasting over twenty minutes, one-fourth of the whole movie. (A normal director would do just the opposite, of course. Each of the action scenes would last ten minutes or longer so the audience would get plenty of entertaining excitement, and the conversations would be kept concise so as not to become boring. Godard loved to break rules.)

BREATHLESS is a celebration of pop culture, but it is also a celebration of high culture. This juxtaposition of opposites is evident in the soundtrack. There are bursts of overly melodramatic jazz of the sort American directors were fond of using to signal danger in gangster movies, but Godard also pays homage to both Brahms and Mozart. The camera focuses on comic strips, comic books, pin-up photos, nudie mags, and two movie posters, one for TEN SECONDS TO HELL and the other for THE HARDER THEY FALL, but it also focuses on prints of famous paintings by Picasso and Renoir. When Patricia mentions Dylan Thomas and William Faulkner, Michel asks her if Faulkner is one of her former lovers. We see Michel comparing his face to a photo of Bogart, but we also see Patricia posing so that Michel can compare her profile to the profile of the girl in the Renoir print.

The relationship between Michel and Patricia is a romp, full of playful, silly routines from light romantic comedies, but it is also a five-hanky tragedy about doomed love. This is, perhaps, Godard's most daring juxtaposition of opposites. As Michel and Patricia bounce around under a sheet, the camera moves discreetly away, focusing on the radio, from which comes blaring a ridiculously inappropriate blast of marching music; after a moment, a naked arm stretches into view from the direction of the bed and gropingly turns off the radio. This little routine is the kind of thing one might expect to see at the end of a bad romantic comedy starring Rock Hudson and Doris Day. But during the same scene Patricia quotes a line from Faulkner asserting that grief is better than nothing, then asks Michel if he agrees. Michel tells her that Faulkner is wrong, that grief is pitiful, that life is an all-or-nothing proposition and he would rather have nothing if he can't have it all. You can see in Patricia's face that she knows he is a goner. Heavy stuff.

And then there is Michel himself. Michel is an amalgam of polar opposites. He is an adorable rapscallion, but he is also a thief, a mugger, and a murderer who feels no remorse. He is a goofy, uninhibited little boy, full of vitality, ready to take on the whole world, but he is also a jaded, burnt-out, totally disillusioned end-of-the-liner who just wants to lie down and die. He is a facile, glib liar, but he is also the one person who will speak the truth when the truth is hardest to speak. He cares nothing for Patricia, nothing at all, but he loves her more than life itself.

This is what happens when you create a character out of bits and pieces of characters taken from dozens of other movies. It is also the reason why Michel is fathomless, and why fans of the movie will argue forever about who he really is. Any ordinary director who tried to create a single character out of so many different prototypes would wind up with a mess on his hands. But under Godard's direction, Belmondo somehow managed to pull all of the diverse and contradictory elements of Michel's character into his own flamboyant personality, and he did so with such equipoise and confidence that we are convinced as  we watch BREATHLESS that Michel is one person, not an artificial composite.