Cubistic Crime

Breathless (Films Around the World) is a cubistic thriller that has an audience because half a century of modern art and movies have rigorously educated the public eye. Filmed on the cheap ($90,000) by an obscure, 30-year-old film critic (Jean-Luc Godard) of the French New Wave, Breathless would seem to offer little to the average star-struck spectator--it features a Hollywood reject (Jean Seberg) and a yam-nosed anonymity (Jean-Paul Belmondo). What's more, it asks the moviegoer to spend 89 minutes sitting still for a jaggedly abstract piece of visual music that is often about as easy to watch as Schoenberg is to listen to. Then why, in the last year, has this picture done a sellout business all over France? Belmondo explains some of the excitement. A ferally magnetic young animal, he is now being called "the male Bardot." But more important than Belmondo are the film's heart-stopping energy and its eye-opening originality.

Breathless has no plot in the usual sense of the word. The script of the picture was a three-page memo. Situation, dialogue, locations were improvised every morning and shot off the cuff. By these casual means Godard has achieved a sort of ad-lib epic, a Joycean harangue of images in which the only real continuity is the irrational coherence of nightmare. Yet, like many nightmares, Breathless has its crazy humor, its anarchic beauty, its night-mind meaning.

The camera finds the hero (Belmondo) flobbing around Marseille, sucking a cigarette, nothing to do: a portrait of the Frenchman as a young punk. Casually, he steals a car, roars north. Sixty. Seventy. Eighty. Police give chase. Gun in glove compartment. Why not? He kills a policeman, panics, runs. Paris. Meets bedmate, an American girl (Seberg), on the street, makes date, strolls off. Police spot him, give chase. Loses them in subway, goes to a men's room. Man washing hands. Punk slugs him, empties his pockets. Girl goes home, finds him in her bed. "Why did you come?" "To sleep with you." He does. She, with a frown: "I'm pregnant." He: "If these were another man's hands, would you care?" She: "Have you read Dylan Thomas?" To bed again. Out again. Steals a car. Police again. Hides with American girl in borrowed flat. More lovemaking. Later she impulsively calls police, betrays him. He couldn't care less. "I feel like going to jail." Police arrive, shoot him down. Smiles up at her, makes funny faces, murmurs affectionately: "You really are a little bitch." Dies. She: "What does he mean?"

Director Godard obviously means that some people are monsters, but quite possibly the question requires an existentialist answer, too. The hero, though such ideas are far beyond his merely physical preoccupations, behaves like a personification of Gide's acte gratuit ("an action motivated by nothing . . . born of itself"), and his story can be seen as an extemporization on the existentialist tenet that life is just one damn thing after another, and death is the thing after that.

But Godard does not pose his philosophical questions very seriously; he seems chiefly concerned with developing an abstract art of cinema, in which time and space are handled as elements in a four-dimensional collage. Camera and performers, moving at random and simultaneously, create the cubistic sense of evolving relativity. Foregrounds and backgrounds engage in a characteristically cubistic dialogue of planes. Similarly, noises and images, words and actions conflict or collaborate in amusing, revealing or intentionally meaningless ways. At one point the screen goes black in broad daylight while the characters go on talking--they are really in the dark.

More daringly cubistic is the manner in which Godard has assembled his footage. Every minute or so, sometimes every few seconds, he has chopped a few feet out of the film, patched it together again without transition. The story can still be followed, but at each cut the film jerks ahead with a syncopated impatience that aptly suggests and stresses the compulsive pace of the hero's doomward drive. More subtly, the trick also distorts, rearranges, relativizes time--much as Picasso manipulated space in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. All meaningful continuity is bewildered; the hero lives, like the animal he is, from second to second, kill to kill. A nasty brute. Godard has sent him to hell in style.

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