the black angel's death song

Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg converse in bed in Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (1960).

All discussion regarding Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960) must begin and end with Jean Seberg’s miraculous performance, one of the most affecting in all the cinema. Sure, Jean-Paul Belmondo gets all the attention, and nobody looks cooler imitating Humphrey Bogart or reading a newspaper than he does, but it’s Seberg that gives Godard’s feature-length debut its emotional weight; she is what separates the fun from the fundamental.

In typical Godard fashion (before we knew it to be Godard fashion, of course, given that he lays all the groundwork with this film), Breathless opens with a crime. A charming hoodlum (Belmondo) with a penchant for talking to himself while driving around the Marseilles countryside kills a cop and heads to Paris to meet a lovely New Yorker (Seberg) he met in Nice a few weeks earlier. Belmondo’s persona is pretty well-established from the get go; he’s channeling not only Bogart, but also James Dean and possibly Godard himself. The film, then, is merely enjoyable until we see Seberg strolling down the Champs-Élysées selling copies of the New York Herald Tribune in a t-shirt, capris, and flats. She likes Belmondo, but also appears to be either too wise or too refined for him. He wants them to go to Italy; she wants to enroll at the Sorbonne.

In talking about this film, many people get caught up in the formal elements of its cinematography—most notably Godard’s liberal use of the jump cut, in which he literally splices the film in the middle of a scene, sometimes even while his characters are speaking, giving it all an air of gritty discontinuity. And while Raoul Coutard’s inventive photography is definitely one of the film’s many strengths, one should also note that even this early in Godard’s career, most of his verbal affinities are there, which may be even more startling than his structural decisions. Seberg quotes Faulkner, tells Belmondo about her new Renoir poster, and interviews director Jean-Pierre Melville at a press conference near an airport. People may not give Godard much credit for these lovely asides because they just figure he was making it all up as he went along (which he probably was), but nobody else was able to play around with the elements of a film while still keeping a swing like this. The only comparable example in American cinema up to that point would have to be John Cassavetes’s Shadows (1959), which, like Godard’s film, was heavily improvised. But Cassavetes was always more interested in naturalistic portraits (culminating with 1976’s The Killing of a Chinese Bookie). Godard, on the other hand, wanted his audience to know his films were just that, making his use of Brechtian techniques that possibly alienated a lot of people—including the jump cuts, as well as his innovate use of sound design coupled with the fact that his actors always appear to be quoting—integral to his purpose.

The 1960s would prove most fruitful for Godard. He went on to make more melancholy (My Life to Live, 1962), more playful (Pierrot le fou, 1965), and more political (Weekend, 1967) films, but none would be as revelatory as this one. Breathless is a tragic love story for the ages.