Breathless.

,
and the Daisy Miller DoD

Breathless, the most important New Wave film which has

reached the United States, is a frightening little chase come
dy with no big speeches and no pretensions. Michel, the
yonng Parisian hood ( Jean-Paul Belmondo ) , steals a car,
kills a highway patrolman, chases after some money owed
him for past thefts, so he and his young American girl friend
can get away to Italy. He finances this chase after the money
by various other crimes along the way. Meanwhile, the po
lice are chasing him. But both Michel's flight and the police
chase are half-hearted. Michel i-sn't desperate to get away
his life doesn't mean that much to him; and the police
( who are reminiscent of Keystone Cops ) carry on a rou
tine bumbling manhnnt. Part of the stylistic peculiarity of
the work-its art-is that while you're watching it, it's light
and playful, off-the-cuff, even a little silly. It seems acci
dental that it embodies more of the modern world than other
movies.
What sneaks up on you in Breathless is that the engaging
ly coy young hood with his loose, random grace and the im
pervious, passively butch American girl are as shallow and
empty as the shiny yonng faces you see in sports cars and
in suburban supermarkets, and in newspapers after nnmoti
vated, pointless crimes. And you're left with the horrible
suspicion that this is a new race, bred in chaos, accepting
chaos as natural, and not caring one way or another about
it or anything else. The heroine, who has literary interests,
quotes Wild Palms, "Between grief and nothing, I will take
grief." But that's just an attitude she likes at that moment;
at the end she demonstrates that it's false. The hero states
the truth for them both: Td choose nothing." The characters
115
1 16 BROADCASTS AND REVIEWS, 1961-1963

of Breathless are casual, carefree moral idiots. The Euro

pean critic, Louis Marcorelles, describes their world as "to
tal immorality, lived skin-deep." And possibly because we
Americans live among just such people and have come to
take them for granted, the film may not, at first, seem quite
so startling as it is. And that's what's frightening about
Breathless: not only are the characters familiar- in an ex
citing, revealing way, they are terribly attractive.
If you foolishly depend on the local reviewers to guide
you, you may have been put off Breathless. To begin with,
where did they get the idea that the title refers to the :Him's
fast editing? That's about like suggesting that the title Two
Way Stretch refers to the wide screen. The French title,
A Bout de Souffle, means "Out of Breath," and it refers to
the hero, who keeps going until he's Winded. Their confu
sion is, however, a tribute to the film's fast, improvisatory
style, the go go go rhythm. The jazz score, the comic tech
nique are perfectly expressive of the lives of the characters;
the jump-cuts convey the tempo and quality of the activities
of characters who don't work up to anything but hop from
one thing to the next. And as the film seems to explain the
people in their own terms, the style has the freshness of
"objectivity." It does seem breathlessly young, newly created.
If you hold the Chronicle's review of Breathless up to the
light, you may see H-E-L-P shining through it.

Certain scenes are presented with utter candor, lacking in form

and impact in their frankness. A long encounter, for instance, in
the small room of Jean Seberg, with whom Belmondo claims to
be in love, is repetitious-but extremely lifelike. And then young
Godard suddenly will present another scene in which a police
inspector is tailing Miss Seberg and searching for Belmondo. This
is staged so clumsily that one wonders whether parody is what
the director intends. But Belmondo's peril is grave and his re
action to his predicament is sensitive. . . . Always energetic and
arrogant, he still suggests both a lost quality and a tender humor.
This is his facade to shield his small cynical world from all that
he does not understand.

The hero of the film understands all that he wants to, but
the critic isn't cynical enough to see the basic fact about
these characters : they just don't give a damn. And that's
what the movie is about. The Examiner's critic lamented that
Breathless was a "hodge-podge" and complained that he
couldn't "warm up" to the characters-which is a bit like
 BREATHLESS, AND THE DAISY MILLER DOLL 117

not being able to warm up to the four Mission District kids

who went out looking for homosexuals to beat up, and man
aged to cause the death of a young schoolteacher. For sheer
not-getting-the-point, it recalls the remark recently overheard
from a well-groomed, blue-rinse-on-the-hair type elderly
lady: "That poor Eichmann! I don't think he's got a China
man's chance."
How do we connect with people who don't give a damn?
Well, is it really so difficult? Even if they weren't all around
us, they'd still be (to quote Double Indemnity) closer than
that.
They are as detached as a foreign colony, as uncommit
ted as visitors from another planet, yet the youth of several
countries seem, to one degree or another, to share the same
characteristics. They're not consciously against society: they
have no ideologies at all, they're not even rebels without a
cause. They're not rebelling against anything-they don't pay
that much attention to what doesn't please or amuse them.
There is nothing they really want to do, and there's nothing
they won't do. Not that they're perverse or deliberately cruel:
they have charm and intelligence-but they live on impulse.
The codes of civilized living presuppose that people
have an inner life and outer aims, but this new race lives for
the moment, because that is all that they care about. And the
standards of judgment we might bring to bear on them
don't touch them and don't interest them. They have the
narcissism of youth, and we are out of it, we are bores.
These are the youthful representatives of mass society. They
seem giddy and gauche and amusingly individualistic, until
you consider that this individualism is not only a reaction to
mass conformity, but, more terrifyingly, is the new form
that mass society takes : indifference to human values.
Godard has used this, as it were, documentary back
ground for a gangster story. In the traditional American
gangster films, we would have been cued for the gangster's
fall: he would have shown the one vanity or sentimental
weakness or misjudgment that would prove fatal. But
Breathless has removed the movie gangster from his melo
dramatic trappings of gangs and power: this gangster is
Bogart apotheosized and he is romantic in a modem sense
just because he doesn't care about anything but the pleas
ures of love and fast cars. There is not even the American
gangster's hatred of cops and squealers. Michel likes cops
ll8 BROADCASTS A ND REVIEWS, 196 1 - 1963

because they're cops. This gangster is post-L'Etranger and

he isn't interested in motives : it's all simple to him, "Killers
kill, squealers squeal." Nobody cares if Michel lives or dies,
and he doesn't worry about it much either.
Yet Godard has too much affection for Michel to make
him a squealer: a killer yes, a squealer no. Despite the un
rest and anarchy in the moral atmosphere, Michel is as
romantic as Pepe Le Moko and as true to love ( and his
death scene is just as operatic and satisfyin g ) . A murderer
and a girl with artistic pretensions. She asks him what he
thinks of a reproduction she is trying on the wall, and he
answers, "Not bad." This doesn't show that he's sufficiently
impressed and she reprimands him with, "Renoir was a very
great painter." In disgust he replies, "I said 'Not bad.' "
There's no doubt which of them responds more. He's honest
and likable, though socially classifiable as a psychopath;
she's a psychopath, too, but the non-classifiable sort-socially
acceptable but a sad, sweet, affectless doll.
There are more ironies than can be sorted out in Patricia
Jean Seberg from Iowa, selected by Otto Preminger from
among thousands of American girls to play the French na
tional heroine, Joan of Arc, and now the national heroine
of France-as the representative American girl abroad. Patricia,
a naive, assured, bland and boyish creature, is like a new
Daisy Miller-but not quite as envisioned by Henry James.
She has the independence, but not the moral qualms or the
Puritan conscience or the high aspirations that James saw
as the special qualities of the American girl. She is, indeed,
the heiress of the ages-but in a more sinister sense than
James imagined : she is so free that she has no sense of
responsibility or guilt. She seems to be playing at existence,
at a career, at "love"; she's "trying them on." But that's all
she's capable of in the way of experience. She doesn't want
to be bothered; when her lover becomes an inconvenience,
she turns him in to the police.
Shot down and dying, the young man gallantly tries to
amuse her, and then looks up at her and remarks-without
judgment or reproach, but rather, descriptively, as a grudging
compliment: "You really are a bitch." ( The actual word he
uses is considerably stronger. ) And in her flat, little-girl,
cornbelt voice, she says, "I don't know what the word means.''
If she does know, she doesn't care to see how it applies
to her. More likely, she really doesn't know, and it wouldn't
 BREATHLESS, AND THE DAISY MILLER DOLL 119

bother her much anyway. The codes of love and loyalty,

in which, if you betray a lover you're a bitch, depend on
stronger emotions than her idle attachment to this lover
one among many. They depend on emotions, and she is
innocent of them. As she had observed earlier, "When we
look into each other's eyes, we get nowhere." An updated
version of the betraying blonde bitches who destroyed so
many movie gangsters, she is innocent even of guilt. As
Jean Seberg plays her-and that's exquisitely-Patricia is the
most terrifying simple muse-goddess-bitch of modem movies.
Next to her, the scheming Stanwyck of Double Indemnity
is as archaic as Theda Bara in A Fool There Was.
Jean-Paul Belmondo, who plays the hood, is probably the
most exciting new presence on the screen since the appear
ance of Brando; nobody holds the screen this way without
enormous reserves of talent. At twenty-six, he has already
appeared in nine plays and nine movies; he may be, as
Peter Brook says, the best young actor in Europe today. In
minor parts, the Alfred Hitchcock personal-appearance bit is
compounded, and Truffaut ( The 400 Blows) , Chabrol ( Le
Beau Serge, The Cousins) , and Godard himself Hit through.
Truffaut supplied the news item on which Godard based
the script; Chabrol lent his name as supervising producer.
But it is Godard's picture, and he has pointed out how he
works : "The cinema is not a trade. It isn't teamwork. One
is always alone while shooting, as though facing a blank
page." His movie is dedicated to Monogram Pictures-who
.were, of course, the producers of cheap American gangster
chase movies, generally shot in city locations. (Breathless
was made for $90,000. ) Another important director appears
in the film-Jean-Pierre Melville-who a few years ago per
formed one of the most amazing feats on film: he entered
into Jean Cocteau's universe and directed, with almost no
funds, the brilliant film version of Cocteau's Les Enfants
Terribles, sometimes known as The Strange Ones. He is re
garded as a sort of spiritual father to the New Wave; he
appears in the movie as a celebrity being interviewed. (The
true celebrity and progenitor of the movement is, of course,
Cocteau. ) Asked by Patricia, "What is your ambition?" the
celebrity teases her with a pseudo-profundity: "To become
immortal, and then to die."
120 BROADCASTS AND REVIEWS, 1961- 1963

The CoJUJIDII

The Cousiru was so badly received in this country that

my liking it may seem merely perverse, so let me take it up
in some detail. Perhaps the best introduction to this skillful,
complex film is through the American critics who kept peo
ple from seeing it. The ineffable Bosley Crowther wrote in
the New York Times that it "has about the most dismal
and defeatist solution for the problem it presents-the prob
lem of youthful disillusion-of any picture we have ever
seen. . . . M. Chabrol is the gloomiest and most despairing
of the new creative French directors. His attitude is ridden
with a sense of defeat and ruin." Youthful disillusion is a
fact and that is how The Cousiru treats it. The movie
doesn't offer any solution because it doesn't pose any prob
lem. Robert Hatch wrote in the Nation:

The latest of the "New Wave" French imports is The Cousins,

a country mouse--city mouse story that dips into the lives and
affairs of today's Paris student bohemia. The picture is written
and directed by Claude Chabrol, but I had the feeling that it
was an exercise in self-expression thrown together by the char
acters themselves. It is just such a story as these bright, aimless,
superficially tough and perilously debauched boys and girls might
consider profound and moving.

Time put it down more coolly in a single-paragraph re

view that distorted the plot and missed the point:

The Cousins . . is a fairly clever, mildly depressing study of

France's 1-got-it-beat generation. Made for $160,000 by a 27-year
old film critic named Claude Chabrol, the film offers a switch on
the story of the city mouse ( Jean-Claude Brialy ) and the country
mouse ( Gerard Blain ) . In this case the city mouse is really a
rat. Enrolled in law school, he seldom attends classes, spends his
time shacking up with "can't-say-no" girls, arranging for abortions,
curing one hangover and planning the next. When the country
cousin, a nice boy but not too bright in school, comes to live
with him, the rat nibbles away at the country boy's time, his