Why Breathless is My Favorite Movie of All Time
[Warning: This film essay contains spoilers. But, honestly, even if you did know the ending of Breathless, you would still be blown away by the movie if you watched it for the first time.]
Jean-Luc Godard could easily be mistaken as the shallowest filmmaker of all time. His films are inspired by the pulpiest B-films — trashy, escapist fantasies — and they are populated by young anti-heroes who are obsessed with being cool. For instance, his classic debut film, Breathless, is a gangster-romance about a petty criminal who steals a car, kills a police officer, and travels to Paris, to find a past lover named Patricia, in order to convince her to run away with him to Italy. They are young; they are beautiful; they are reckless. The film’s story is a successful formula for wildly entertaining trash, but it is the farthest thing from a story about real life.
Yet, strangely enough, I have never encountered a more extraordinarily relatable film in my life. Because of the movie Breathless, I feel like I have found that rare director in this world who actually understands me — who not only understands me, but is also willing to forgive me for my flaws. One surprisingly finds an enormous amount of compassion in a movie by Godard.
Godard’s Breathless is about two of the most repulsive, irritating, and irresponsible people you will have ever met in the world of cinema — Michel Poiccard and Patricia Franchini. One is a womanizing gangster. The other is an American journalist, whose rich parents are paying for her to live in Paris. Both of them are shallow, self-absorbed, lazy, bored, always looking at themselves in the mirror, comatose to the world around them, constantly scheming to cheat the people in their lives. Whenever Michel or Patricia says any line that contains feeling, you are not sure whether they are speaking from the heart, or if they’re just saying something cool that they once heard in a movie. (Patricia: I don’t know if I’m unhappy because I’m not free, or if I’m not free because I’m unhappy.)
Yet, despite the sheer awfulness of these two young heroes, by the end of the film — when Patricia is coldly staring at Michel, who is collapsing on a street, gasping for breath, bleeding, cornered by the cops, absolutely miserable about life — we have learned to fall in love with these two most despicable human beings. And, in order to convince his audience to love these two heroes, Godard does not even use the easy tricks that are used by most filmmakers. Michel and Patricia do not earn our admiration because they are glamorous, or because their lives are more exciting than ours.
Rather, they earn our sympathy. Despite the fact that Michel has just killed a man within the first five minutes of the film, the rest of the film turns out to be pretty uneventful. For the most part, Michel and Patricia spend a lot of their time together just doing things that normal young people do. They flirt with each other, cuddle in her bedroom, tell jokes, bicker, talk about love, talk about the future — or their lack of a future.
Michel and Patricia seem to forget that there was ever even a plot to their story, and so does the audience. There is a scene, in which Michel is just lying in Patricia’s bed, while he watches Patricia hang a poster up in her room, and as we watch them lounge around, we no longer see either of them as doomed lovers, or as criminals — we just see them as two kids.
Likewise, for the majority of the film, Michel and Patricia are just struggling with normal issues that every young person struggles with from day to day. Michel and Patricia each has their own insecurities, their bouts of indecisiveness, and their anxieties about the future.
Michel and Patricia are two of the most stylish characters you’ve ever seen. Michel wears the suit and fedora, à la Humphrey Bogart, and Patricia always wears the most charming, Breton-striped shirts. Her style is self-consciously Parisian, as if she nabbed her outfits off of a postcard. Both of them are stylish, for the most part, because they have nothing else to do.
You probably know someone, maybe even several people, who is just like Michel and Patricia. You know, the people who curate themselves obsessively on Instagram — the people who constantly take pictures of their immaculate brunches, or their snazzy outfits that they wore to Coachella, or their strangely frequent vacations in Thailand. Perhaps you will even admit that you are this kind of person.
Michel and Patricia have a striking amount of things in common with the kids who flood our Instagram feeds today. Like the kids of our own generation, Michel and Patricia obsessively curate their lives because they do not have any real goals or values. They fill the void by cobbling together make-shift identities, based off the pop culture that they consume. Michel loves to mimic Humphrey Bogart, and he has a habit of quoting classic crime films, like The Maltese Falcon. Patricia, on the other hand, has dreams of being a European sophisticate: she always wants to talk about Renoir, or Faulkner, or her record collection of classical music that she’s got stashed in her bedroom.
They seem to live their entire lives based off of some idea that they each got from a movie. Why did Michel enter his life of crime? Because Humphrey Bogart made it look cool. Why did young Patricia dream of Paris? Probably because of an Audrey Hepburn movie, like Funny Face or Sabrina. Why does Michel even lust for Patricia so badly? I think, honestly, it’s because, as a boy who has fallen in love with Hollywood, Michel fetishizes all things American.
And, even though there is this constant question throughout the film, of whether they actually love each or not, because the two of them can treat each other quite awfully at times, I do think that there is a genuine connection between the two. I think that Michel has found that rare woman who allows him to indulge in his Hollywood-perfect fantasy, and vice-versa. Their romance, together, is one giant make-believe playdate.
It is a make-believe playdate that never seems to end. Michel and Patricia each reminds me of someone who is Instagram famous, or of a Youtube star like Jenn Im, whose content always makes me ask the question, “does she ever get to take a break from the camera?” Michel is honestly, quite an abrasive guy. He’s incessantly trying to convince Patricia to fuck, and when she refuses his advances, he often insults her, out of frustration. But, the film poses a strange question: is Michel actually a rude human being, or he is just trying to play the part? Because, of course, a gangster isn’t really a gangster, if he isn’t a hardboiled asshole. Could it be, that Michel is, deep down, a decent boy, if only he hadn’t gotten so lost in his fantasy?
So, of course, Michel and Patricia take their playdate too far, and everything that never seems to end does in fact end, and their playdate ends in disaster. She is never as fully committed to their adventure as Michel — she is never truly committed to any idea, really — so she eventually turns him into the cops. He could’ve run away along time ago, but Michel needed the plot of his life to be perfect before he ran away, and his gangster fantasy would have never been complete without his blonde femme fatale. So, the movie ends with him bleeding and, living up to the movie’s title, out of breath.
If I had met either of these two characters in real life, to be honest, I’d probably have wanted to spit in their faces. Michel is the type of guy to bump into you on the street, and yell at you, “Hey! Watch it!” while Patricia is the type of girl who only pretends to be interested in what you have to say. Yet, because I was allowed to peer so intimately into the inner lives of these two characters, through the magical storytelling of Jean-Luc Godard, I instead realized how much I have in common with Michel and Patricia.
For some reason, by the end, you just want to forgive Michel for all the awful things that he’s done — for the cars that he’s stole and even the cop that he killed — and you also want to forgive Patricia for every shallow thing she’s ever done in her life and for her act of betrayal at the very end of the film. Because, personally, when I look back at the film, I only remember the story of two kids who were trapped by their own desires and their own uncertainties about the future.
I see a lot of myself in Michel and Patricia. And, when I was still in college, every party I went to was populated with countless dozens of Michels and Patricias.
Throughout most of my own life, I have had no other desire than to fill my life with beautiful things. To have nice clothes. To have stylish posters in my room. To eat at Yelp-famous restaurants, and to go to nice concerts, and to be cultured enough to be able to quote the classic books and quote the classic films, and to be able to tell a girl an intelligent opinion about a Mark Rothko painting, if I ever saw one during a date at an art museum.
Lately, I have been confronted with the ugliness of all these desires. I mean, how selfish does one have to be, to only be concerned with beauty and art, and not at all with the suffering of other people around one’s self? After all, what if, eventually, you could have watched all the films that there ever was to watch? What purpose would you be left with, in life, after that?
Throughout this past year, I have been trying my hardest to find new values in life. Yet, my most difficult task, so far, has been to move past the guilt that I have racked up, over all my time that I wasted throughout my youth, desiring all these absurd, pointless, aesthetic ideals, which are chased after by Michel and Patricia in Breathless. Yet, as odd as it sounds, Breathless is a movie that allows me to live with myself. After all, if I can learn to forgive two people as despicable as Michel and Patricia, perhaps I might as well forgive myself too, while I’m at it, so that I can at least be okay with the person whom I see in the mirror.
The true artist, at least the kind of artist whom I admire the most, is the artist who is brave enough to take something ugly and transmute it into something beautiful. We often take the bravery of these artists for granted. Italian, for instance, may now have a reputation as a language for lovers and poets, and it may seem like it has been eternally so. But, there was a point in history when Italian was the language of commoners, and Latin was the language of culture, and poetry, and all of the things that the tastemakers associated with the good life. It took a person like Dante Alighieri, with all of his patience and compassion and ingenuity, to reveal the rhythms and music and magic of the Italian language, to the Western world.
Jean-Luc Godard is that kind of artist, the true artist. We take his legacy for granted, because we are a generation who grew up with so many classic gangster films, such as The Godfather and Pulp Fiction and every other film in the entire pantheon of film noir. But, we often forget the fact that there was a time in history, when a person would have been ashamed to admit that his favorite film was a gangster film, because, like the language of Italian, the gangster film was once a medium that was considered trash.
Honestly, it was Jean-Luc Godard who had that keen insight to elevate the gangster film to the status of high art. As an artist, he said to the world, “Hey! Look! These things could be beautiful too, if you just had the patience to understand them.”
Godard also had this same attitude towards the human soul. Godard took the lives of two petty youngsters, whose problems were shallow and strange, and as a filmmaker, he transmuted the lives of these two youngsters into the most epic drama of a lifetime — a real Greek tragedy. Through the eyes of an artist like Godard, there is even a lesson to be learned from the sad lives of Michel Poiccard and Patricia Franchini. Here is a real artist, my friends: a person who teaches us compassion; who teaches us patience; who teaches us to forgive ourselves.