September 9, 2023

SEPTEMBER 8, 2023

sEPTEMBER 7, 2023

Film Comment

Quick film recommendation.

Breathless (1960) French new wave film. Jean-Luc Godard. Excellent film. Seriously groundbreaking, the template for all the road trip films you’ve seen. And it’s a great template.

As far as plot is concerned, it’s about a not particularly talented French car thief who’s in love with an American woman.

In terms of meaning, themes, what you can take from the film, there’s so much. Just to touch on one of the film’s most notable aspects, it definitely plays with the gap between the exciting lives depicted on the silver screen and prosaic, everyday life. Our car thief, Michel, fancies himself as the star of a gangster film. He studies a poster of Humphrey Bogart- the ideal he wants to emulate. And he looks the part with his fedora, sunglasses, and cigarettes. Particularly the cigarettes. He’s never not smoking. If you can find a frame in which he’s not smoking, where a cigarette isn’t dangling from his lips, I’ll be boundlessly impressed. The problem is Michel isn’t in a film. He’s in the real world. And the real world is boring. Even if you’re an actual criminal, you have to buy newspapers, eat in restaurants, worry about money, and all the rest. Michel’s chosen profession affords him brief moments of excitement, but just moments, and they’re few and far between.