à bout de souffle (d godard, w truffaut)

Who would have thought I had never actually seen Breathless in its entirety? Clips galore, a million posters or stills on bedroom walls, Belmondo and Seberg, as iconic as Bogart and Bergman, Godard’s vainglorious ambition realised. Perhaps even more so, as Bogart gradually fades into the cinematic palaeolithic age. Who has stepped into the breach to follow Seberg and Belmondo? Or has romantic cool been killed off, once and for all? Answers on a postcard.

My friend, Jason, had stills from À Bout de Souffle on his study wall. (We had individual studies where I went to school, that was how it was.) If Godard understood one thing that Anglo-Saxon filmmakers didn’t, until then, it was the seductive power of the image, cinema’s secret weapon, a weapon whose potency can still elevate cinema above and beyond the Dickensian nouvel vague of the boxset series. The irony being that once they cottoned on, every Anglo-Saxon film school, and film school student, began to follow in Godard’s footsteps, so that the image has now acquired, within the arcane corners of subsidised cinema, the breeding ground for the mainstream, an almost religious devotion. As a result delivering films which are a collection of moments, like misshaped pearls strung together on a string, each one struggling for transcendence, rarely coming together to form a collective whole.

Or perhaps Tarkovsky is to blame. Still, the experience of watching a film that one has imagined already watched, but one hasn’t actually seen, is disconcerting. Every moment a predictable surprise. What I didn’t expect, perhaps, was the amorality of Belmondo’s anti-hero. He’s an unreconstructed bastard and he’s proud of it. Populist existentialism. This is one aspect of Hazanavicius’ film, Redoubtable, which feels spot-on, as the commoners approach his Godard and ask when he’s going to start making entertaining movies again, like À Bout De Souffle. The film exudes a rip-it-up delight, which goes hand-in-hand with the slapstick violence sequences, as though cast and crew are giving two fingers to the values of their elders. (Not without justification, given what the French were up to in Algeria etc). This is proto-punk, guitar-smashing par excellence. Albeit carried off with a breathless Parisian charm.