Elliot's Watching week of 7-28-21: Godard's Breathless

 Elliot’s Watching - Week of 7-28-21: Godard's Breathless 

Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 debut, breakthrough film, Breathless, remains some 60 years later as still total fun to watch - all the more impressive in that the moral stance of the movie is despicable. But how can you not enjoy free-wheeling through Paris (in the days before traffic and tourist jams) in a stole American car? The adorable French with accent American of the young Jean Seberg? The super-cool demeanor of the young Jean-Paul Belmondo, cigarette dangled from lip a la Bogart, the weird caressing of his own lips a la … Belmondo? The fast pace of the film, relentless, except there in the middle is the scene in Seberg’s tiny apartment and Belmondo spends what seems like days struggling to get her into bed with him - one of the longest scenes in film at that time, I would imagine? The hilarious news conference with the famous visiting novelist (played by Melville) whose ambition is “to become immortal, and then to die”? Belmondo’s take on a poster of a Picasso: “J’ai dit pas mal!”? Or his choice between grief and nothing: Rien. And so on. And yet … we know nothing about the back story of either of the two leads, except that Belmondo uses 2 names and has been involved in some shady deals in Nice and that Seberg is in Paris for as long as her parents will foot the bill for the Sorbonne. So she’s bright and ambitious, landing a p-t job, partly on basis of her looks, writing for (and also hawking) the NY Herald Tribune. But we do know that she “makes bad choices,” linking her fate to this obviously criminal careerist who has shot and killed a police officer w/out regret or remorse. How can we like or pity either of them? So it’s a film into whose moral ambiguity, at best (nihilism at worst) that viewers have to buy into, at least for 90 minutes - not hard to do, while watching the film, but not a world we’d want to inhabit or have our kids inhabit for a second.