It may seem redundant, or even ironic, that an American filmmaker trying to jump-start his career in Hollywood would wish to remake a French film that already refers so heavily to Hollywood cinema. Yet this did not stop Jim McBride from remaking Jean-Luc Godard's classic 1959 film, A bout de souffle. Godard's first film is definitive of the French New Wave movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s that is said to have revolutionized cinema not just in France, but world-wide. Not only that, but his film is one of the pioneers of the movement. McBride's 1983 remake, entitled Breathless, is also definitive of the cinematic culture from which it came: that of 1980s Hollywood. However, it is certainly nothing remotely close to a pioneer. Though it was not actually backed by a major Hollywood studio, Breathless contains formulaic 1980s Hollywood characteristics such as lighting that flatters and glorifies the actors; steady camera movements and conventional cinematography; polished, snappy dialogue; explicit sexuality; multiple action sequences; numerous pop-culture references; continuity editing that moves the narrative along smoothly; a traditional Hollywood happy ending; and a Hollywood icon, Richard Gere, in the starring role. The original Godard film contains none of these elements. The black-and-white film, shot in four weeks with a budget of roughly $85,000 (Neupert, 209) does contain harsh, unflattering lighting; revolutionary cinematography that makes use of handheld camera techniques; realistic, intelligent dialogue; implied sexuality; a lack of action; numerous references to well-respected film, art, and literature; discontinuous editing that tends to break up the narrative; a morosely tragic ending; and two actors lesser-known at the time, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, in the starring roles. The differences between the two films certainly do not end there, and a comparison of the two offers a unique perspective into both one of the most influential film movements in history and one of the most long-standing institutions of film history.
To properly understand the significance of A bout de souffle, one must first understand the French New Wave movement of which it was part and how this movement came to be. As in so many other cultures around the world, World War II had a strong impact on France and subsequently French cinema. For one, when the Nazi occupation of France ended in 1944, the French were extremely eager to reassert their cultural importance in Europe and the rest of the world (Neupert, 5). This led to the welcoming of the New Wave, but of course it did not happen so quickly. France made rapid financial rebound due to a devalued franc and excused war debt by the United States and by 1950 had a balanced national budget (Neupert, 6). In addition, the standard of living for all classes improved with the help of strong labour unions and active roles played by the Socialist and Communist Parties (Neupert, 7). Consequently, the average French family began to move towards a more consumer-based lifestyle; one that allowed for the purchase of automobiles and televisions, extended vacations, more frequent trips to restaurants and nightclubs, all pulling them away from the cinemas (Neupert, 8). In fact, movies were losing nearly one-third of their audience by the mid-1950s (Neupert, 8). Along with this new consumer-based culture came a new youth, one disconnected to their parents' generation, and interested in new, revolutionary forms of art and entertainment, such as the New Novel, a new sub-genre of French literature that defied narrative conventions such as characterization and cause-and-effect in novels (Neupert, 16). By the late 1950s, French film critics were realizing the dire necessity for a new film movement to captivate this generation (Neupert, 16). Meanwhile, those who were actually attending the cinemas after the occupation were seeing a sort of retelling of film history, with the return of all of the banned and censured films of pre-war France, as well as many recent American films, such as the films noir (Neupert, 26, 7). Among the audience that was soaking up all of the classic French and American films was a group of young cinephiles that was simultaneously soaking up the abundant amount of intelligent and sophisticated film criticism of the time, written by such well respected intellectuals as existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (Neupert, 27). This group of young men would go on to write for the now-highly-respected film journal, Cahiers du cinema, began in 1951, one of the many French film journals that acted as the world's most authoritative voices in film criticism (Neupert, 28-9). Among this group were 22-year-old Jean-Luc Godard; 20-year old Francois Truffaut, who would later go on to become one of the most influential filmmakers in the New Wave movement and coin the story on which A bout de souffle is based; and some of their New Wave contemporaries (Neupert, 29). While writing for Cahiers, the authoritative voices of these future filmmakers grew stronger as their knowledge of films and film history grew broader. They brought Cahiers du cinema's definitive focus to the concept of the auteur (Neupert, 30), which viewed the director as the star of the film, celebrating his unique styles and filmmaking techniques, contrary to the Hollywood tradition of celebrating the lead actors as the stars of the film. As Godard and his fellow writers' knowledge of film grew, along with their frustrations with conventional cinema, they began to enter into film production themselves with the help of Film Aid money from the Centre National de la Cinematographie (CNC); technological advances that allowed for much smaller, more portable cameras and other filmmaking equipment; and dedicated, efficient, independent producers such as Georges de Beauregard, who would produce A bout de souffle (Neupert, 37-43). And so the French New Wave was born.
Essentially, the New Wave was an entirely new approach to filmmaking, that was born out of a vast knowledge of film history, a boredom of conventions, and a desire to break them. Being spear-headed by a group of young film critics, it was a very cognitive, thought-based cinema, rooted in ideology and film theory, though they did not have a vast technical knowledge of film. The films produced under the movement were influenced by a very low budget, but they were also of an independent nature and therefore the directors had complete artistic freedom. In being so definitively New Wave, A bout de souffle offers an excellent illustration of what the artistic product of these cultural, financial, technological, and ideological changes to cinema looks like.
The referential narrative of A bout de souffle is modeled after a basic Hollywood B-movie plot. In this way, Godard seems to be celebrating his appreciation for Hollywood cinema, especially the cheaply produced film noir genre. As he is quoted by Carolyn A. Durham in her book Double Takes: Culture and Gender in French Films and Their American Remakes, Godard said of his intentions in A bout de souffle, “What I wanted was to take a conventional story and remake, but differently, everything the cinema had done” (51). And this is precisely what he does with the film. The plot of the film revolves around a chain smoking young car theft named Michel Poiccard, played with an indifferent realism by Jean-Paul Belmondo, and his girlfriend Patricia Franchini, an American journalism student studying in Paris and selling copies of the New York Herald Tribune, played by Jean Seberg. Appropriately, Michel idolizes Humphrey Bogart, a star of the Hollywood film noir genre, in one scene gazing at pictures of the actor, whilst perfecting his imitation of Bogart's characteristic rubbing of his thumb over his lips, which he consistently does throughout the film. In the first few minutes of the film, Michel is seen stealing a car and driving it into the French countryside. He ends up getting pulled over by a policeman, to which he responds by impulsively shooting the officer with the gun he finds in the stolen vehicle. He then makes his way to Paris in order to find Patricia and convince her to flee to Italy with him, once he earns the money from the car he must deliver. Patricia is less than willing, however, and so he stays in Paris, hiding out in her apartment, all the while trying to convince her to go with him and contact his business partner, Antonio Berrutti, who has his money. This simple and cliched plot line is almost irrelevant to the true substance of the film, however, acting more as a reference to conventional Hollywood cinema than anything else. The majority of the film's substance is found in the dialogue between Michel and Patricia, from which can be derived an ideological meaning relating to the relationship between a man and a woman, and the lack of true communication between the genders, as well as a lack of compatibility between French and American cultures. Supporting this, Richard Neupert writes in his book, A History of the French New Wave Cinema:
The differences between Patricia and Michel are partly defined by their taste in art: he likes Bogart and only one Mozart violin concerto; she likes Brahms, Renoir paintings, and William Faulkner novels. At one point she even hangs up a poster of a Renoir painting and asks Michel what he thinks. He rubs her bottom and replies, 'Not bad.' They rarely speak about the same things with the same meanings (214).
While Patricia seems to embody the ideals of a young, independent, liberated American woman with intellectual goals and pursuits, Michel seems more to resemble an Existentialist anti-hero model, specific to French culture after World War II, due to the popularity of the work of French existentialist philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. However, what is more significant about A bout de souffle in terms of an illustration of the New Wave movement is not necessarily these ideological meanings, but the way Godard defies the film conventions set up by the narrative.
While A bout de souffle is a celebration of film history, the aggressive way in which Godard contradicts cinematic expectations makes it feel as if it is simultaneously an attack on the very conventional cinema it is modeled after. For one, the lighting is harsh and unflattering, enhancing the realism of film. The majority of the camera work is handheld, giving it a shaky, documentary feel that was certainly uncommon in narrative cinema in 1959. The entire film, from beginning to end, is littered with jump-cuts, interrupting the action and jumping ahead to a later time in the same scene, sometimes when a character is in mid-sentence. The soundtrack, however, typically remains consistent, the dialogue not always syncing to a character's moving lips. Another interesting thing about the soundtrack is that, while it may be consistent in terms of temporal movement, it is not always consistent in terms of the actual sounds. For instance, at one point there is a diegetic sound of feet walking, yet no sound for the traffic driving on the road, which is visible in the shot. Other times, diegetic sounds may be exaggerated, drowning out the dialogue. Also unique and revolutionary is the fact that Godard makes the audience explicitly aware that they are watching a film. He does this by having the actors directly address the camera on occasion. This happens most startlingly within the first few minutes of the film, as Michel is driving down the country roads, a medium close up on his profile, the camera in the position of the front passenger seat. He says, “If you don't like the sea... if you don't like the mountains... if you don't like the city... then get stuffed!” turning and looking directly into the camera as he recites each phrase. Perhaps the most startling way that this film defies convention, however, is in the narrative itself. At the film's conclusion, after the romance between Michel and Patricia has been built up, the inability to communicate overridden by the fact that they both say they love each other, Patricia contacts the police and notifies them of Michel's location. She tells Michel what she has done, but instead of fleeing, he stays, and does not even put up a fight when the cops find him, though his friend pushes a gun into his hand. He is shot in the back and falls to the ground, dying. His monumental last sentence is, “That's really disgusting”, translated to Patricia by police officer as, “You are really a bitch.” The final shot of the film is a close-up of an indifferent Patricia looking straight into the camera as she imitates the Bogart thumb-over-lip rub and then turns away from the camera. These extremely unconventional characteristics illustrate not only the revolutionary qualities of this film, but also of the New Wave film movement in general. The movement did not last long, ending in the mid-1960s, yet its influence was far-reaching and permanent.
Ironically, one film that was not influenced by A bout de souffle's defiance of convention was, in fact, McBride's remake. This is because McBride kept his film so closely tied to the Hollywood convention, most likely for financial reasons. This is explained by Stephen Prince in his book A New Pot of Gold: Hollywood Under the Electronic Rainbow, 1980-1989 when he writes, “Given their high production costs, American films need to attract as many viewers as they can, and the broad-based appeals they offer are often incompatible with strict ideological or political coherence. This is why the tradition of “message” filmmaking in the American industry is so minimal and toothless” (315). This helps explain Breathless's lack of message or artistic statement next to the original film. It also brings up the extreme difference between the films in terms of cinematic culture. A bout de souffle is a product of a revolutionary film movement that was very low-budget and independent, and Godard's purpose in making it was to experiment with the possibilities of film. Though it was shot in such a short time, and more production certainly went into the remake, it is an individual work of art, with many artistic meanings and messages attached to it, made separate from any long-standing studios or establishments. Breathless, however, in traditional Hollywood style, was produced primarily as a means of gaining a wide audience in order to make money, not simply for a small, high-culture appreciating audience, as was the audience for A bout de souffle. Therefore, there is no need for it to replicate any of the original film's meaning. This is good for McBride, because the story in its new American context is not able to replicate any of the original film's meaning, anyway.
In McBride's version, the story takes place in Los Angeles, rather than Paris. The character of Michel is replaced by that of Jesse Lujack, an American car thief, obsessed not with Humphrey Bogart, but with Jerry Lee Lewis, and especially the Marvel comic book character, The Silver Surfer. To Jesse, The Silver Surfer represents the romantic in him, as the hero's motto is, “Love is the power supreme.” Indeed, Michel's existentialist nature is completely replaced with Jesse's sentimental, romantic nature, which allows Richard Gere to play him with an over-the-top flamboyance. Monica Poiccard, the French architecture student attending UCLA that replaces Patricia's character, has a somewhat less significant role than Patricia does in A bout de souffle. She may have the same amount of screen time, yet she has less of a cultural identity, her French nationality never playing much of a role in the dialogue and relationship between her and Jesse, other than a few uses of French words, which has almost no relevance to the film's meaning. Her scenes with Jesse are much more sexual than those of Michel and Patricia. She is seen in the nude multiple times, as is Jesse, the focus of the film seeming to turn away from any substance in the dialogue to simply a somewhat erotic display of the two attractive actors having sex, the figures of their bodies holding more importance in some moments than any other aspect of the film. In this way Breathless adheres to the Hollywood tradition of the actors as the glorified stars and center of the film, changing the director's role from a creative auteur with a message to deliver and an artistic style in which to deliver it in, as Godard and the other New Wave directors believed a director's role should be, to that of simply a technical advisor, overseeing the the filming of the true artists of the film. Durham offers an additional explanation of Jesse and Monica's physical intimacy compared to Michel and Patricia's more cognitive, speech-based relationship when she defines
French culture as predominantly literary and linguistic and its American counterpart as essentially visual. (Note that Patricia goes to Paris to become a writer; and Monica comes to Los Angeles to study architecture.) Thus, despite Godard's interest in visual experimentation, the longest scene in A bout de souffle takes place in a hotel room where Patricia and Michel engage in precisely the kind of verbal exchange... characteristic of the discourse of the Francophone couple: they mock, contradict, and criticize each other, and they consistently take opposite positions on every issue they discuss. In contrast, although conversational sequences retain their centrality in Breathless, McBride eliminates the linguistic hierarchy that structures the relationship between the lovers in the French film and substitutes a series of narrative and visual strategies that insist on the spatial proximity and the metaphoric resemblance of the American movie couple (68).
This offers an interesting comparison of cultures both as it relates to cinema and male-female relationships. The idea that America is a more visual culture, while France is a more literary and linguistic culture is illustrated well in looking at these two films together. Godard's film is meant to be visually experimental of course, yet the significance of the experimentation is more the idea of it; the textual elements of A bout de souffle are certainly more emphasized and important to the film. However, McBride's film is in color, the cinematography is much smoother, and much importance is placed on the aesthetic beauty of the film, at least much more so than in A bout de souffle, which is purposely made not to be aesthetically pleasing in the traditional sense.
After a deeper look at both of these films, it almost seems wrong to compare them, because they are completely different entities, despite their similar referential premises. However, comparing them has, in fact, offered an interesting look into the extreme differences between two of the most essential film-producing cultures in the western world. Whereas A bout de souffle keeps within the French tradition of cinema as primarily art, secondarily economic product, Breathless keeps within the Hollywood tradition of cinema as primarily economic product, secondarily art. As was discussed, there are a number of other key differences in both films, such as the lack of ideology in Breathless, and lack of aesthetic beauty in A bout de souffle. This is not to say either film is worse than the other, however; Breathless should not be viewed as any sort of comment or degradation of A bout de souffle, because it simply is not. A bout de souffle is an experimental, revolutionary art film, and McBride simply borrowed the basic story line in order to craft his aesthetically pleasing Hollywood love story that promised to be a financial success. Of course, his admission of this when he was interviewed for Cahiers du cinema in August 1983, when he said that he “saw Godard's New Wave classic as little more than a marketable property” (Durham, 67) may not have been taken with much sympathy, yet, it seems almost appropriate that the classical Hollywood narrative that Godard celebrates in his monumental film be recycled back into its original culture.
Works Cited
Durham, Carolyn A. Double Takes: Culture and Gender in French Films and Their American
Remakes. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1998.
Neupert, Richard. A History of the French New Wave Cinema. Madison, Wisconsin: The University of
Wisconsin Press, 2007.
Prince, Stephen. A New Pot of Gold: Hollywood Under the Electronic Rainbow, 1980-1989. New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons, 2000.