Breathless

"Heard the one about the condemned man?" The French lout playacting as an American gangster and the American student playacting as a French cosmopolite, observed by the critic playacting as a filmmaker. The hepcat (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is a bogus Bogie, stealing a car because it's there and killing a patrolman because there's a gun in the glove compartment. (He checks the newspaper for the consequences, then wipes his shoes with it.) His squeeze (Jean Seberg) hawks the New York Herald Tribune up and down the Champs-Elysées, he has no use for it because there's no horoscope. "I wanna know the future, don't you?" Jean-Luc Godard's luminous freshman essay, situating cinema amid the other arts while destabilizing it. The crook witnesses an accident and crosses himself, when in need of money for a date he blithely mugs another fellow in a public restroom. Bob le Flambeur is a character in this underworld, and there's Jean-Pierre Melville holding court at the Orly Airport, fielding questions from the gamine. "What's your greatest ambition?" "To become immortal, then die." Modernity's conflicting stimuli, "tout ou rien." Cut the dull bits out, says Hitchcock, jump-cutting alongside extended tracking shots. An aesthetic debate under the sheets—the girlfriend posed next to a Renoir poster ("pas mal"), a dash of Faulkner, the jazzy accompaniment that sometimes becomes a wailing siren. The instantaneity of Godard's imagery hits like quick pencil strokes, a despairing tenderness is never far from the raffish surface. Paris aflutter during Eisenhower's visit, Keystone Cops on the trail, the outlaw couple ditch them in a theater playing a Boetticher western, too enraptured by each other to notice the glowing screen. "Un sens de la beauté." The tribute to Monogram Pictures concludes in the poetic-fatalist tradition, the hero shot and stumbling like Gabin in Quai des Brumes. "The classical bitch's eye," as Beckett would say, questioned by the final close-up. Cinematography by Raoul Coutard. In black and white.