BREATHLESS (’83): About the Souffle

Trailer

Of all the major figures of the French New Wave, Jean-Luc Godard is simultaneously one of the most revered and most divisive. Like Picasso, Godard’s work can be characterized by periods, each stage in his filmography becoming increasingly experimental and more inaccessible to few outside his most devoted fans. However, it’s his early youth culture targeted work in the 1960s that made him the iconoclast he’s known as today, especially his landmark debut Breathless (aka À bout de souffle). To remake a watershed film would be heresy, yet in 1983 it was, and was pretty damn good in its own right.

To a large degree, Breathless ’83 feels like an inversion of Godard’s film. Jean-Paul Belmondo’s obsession with Humphrey Bogart in the original has been replaced by an affixation of Marvel’s Silver Surfer. The easygoing jazz score of the original is shoved aside by blaring rockabilly and soul music. From the opening shot of the film, director Jim McBride makes it clear that this isn’t your parents’ Breathless. The stark black and white cinematography is shoved aside in favor of an opening scene with an almost entirely red color palette, proudly proclaiming its distinctly pop art approach to this iconic story. 

Breathless ’83 (which I’ll call the remake for shorthand) more or less follows the major story beats of Godard’s original: a drifter kills a cop and goes on the lam to find an old flame to shack up with. Like Pauline Kael once described Godard’s work at the time, the film is about the story between the lines, the conversations and history of the characters one interprets underneath the rote lovers on the run narrative.

Whereas Godard sought to interpret the American crime stories of his youth through a distinctly French lens, McBride reclaims it and dials it up to 10 with pure comic book spectacle. There’s a certain level of meta commentary that initially seems absent, but slowly begins to trickle in the longer the film goes, revealing (to my overthinking mind) a commentary on Breathless itself. The film observes its drifter hero Jesse (Richard Gere) as he attempts to coast through life, buying into his own swagger and charm to an almost parodic extent. The effortless, laid back cool of Jean-Paul Belmondo is now transposed onto a protagonist who seems to have watched Belmondo and now wants to be him, but all the effort he puts into doing it ultimately have the opposite effect.

There’s a charming sense of dorkiness to Gere’s performance in the role, helped in no small part to his devotion to pop culture itself. In one of the best scenes of the film, Gere gets into an argument with a teenager at a newsstand about why the Silver Surfer doesn’t suck. Like the cosmic hero he defends, Jesse is a romantic, constantly roaming in search of pure love, an idealism that ultimately leads to his downfall. To underscore this, McBride utilizes a quintessential Godard technique of insert shots of Silver Surfer comic book panels as Gere provides voice over. He sees himself as the comic book hero of his own story, yet his world isn’t nearly as fantastic as he’d like to believe. 

It’s easy to see why Tarantino was a fan of this film, from Gere’s monologues about the greatness of Jerry Lee Lewis to the wannabe Elvis persona he puts on. Undoubtedly the inspiration for Christian Slater’s character in True Romance, the conversations on pop culture between Jesse and his lover Monica (Valérie Kaprisky) have a flavor of authenticity that contrasts with Godard’s sometimes overly ponderous examinations of the mundane. At one point, Monica asks Jesse if he knows who William Faulkner is, to which he replies: “Who’s he? Some guy who fucks?” While this seems like a throwaway punchline to emphasize Jesse’s anti-intellectualism, it really revels everything there is to know about his character, namely that there isn’t anything. He’s a shell of personas and identification, crafting an image of himself of what he’d like to be rather than what he is. When he finally must go down in a blaze of myopic glory against the police, he does it with a smile, just like the heroes he’s watched all his life on TV would. 

Godard was right. All you need to make a great movie is a girl and a gun.