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Breathless
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You’ve got to hand it to Raymond Bellour.
Some people who haven’t read much of his work since circa 1976 dismiss him as a
fearsome, impenetrable semiologist/narratologist; but he is, in fact, a dab
hand at poetic phrases that encapsulate the cinema-viewing experience. Back in
the ‘70s he evoked “that unreal real we call film”. More recently, he has
elaborated an argument about the importance of watching films under properly
pre-digital projection conditions, declaring that movies crucially “offer an
irreducibly singular configuration, in which the singularities of space intersect
with the fatalities of time”.
However, I must confess that, although I did have my
virgin experience of Jim McBride’s masterpiece Breathless (1983) in a 35 millimetre cinema, I don’t really care
how I re-watch it today: on a TV screen, on YouTube, or just replayed over and
over as a memory in my head (which is, finally, the only unreal real that matters) … Because, no matter how it gets
projected, those singularities and fatalities stay firm.
Every cut, every movement, every word, every musical
note in the final 90 seconds of this film is mine forever. A sudden close-up of
Monica (Valérie Kaprisky) running, shouting: “Jesse,
I love you, Jesse!” The man himself (played by Richard Gere, either outrageously
overdressed or shamelessly undressed at all times), caught in the middle of a
street – cops behind him, his girl (who has just betrayed him) in front, and a
criminal connection speeding away in a car after throwing him a gun as his last
hope of survival. It’s the end of the line for Jesse, after a louche life of
reckless, opportunistic crime – perhaps the only way he could manage to stay a
teenager for all his days and nights.
So now, at the end, trapped and doomed, what does
Jesse do? Suddenly, ridiculously, sublimely, he sings and dances to his favourite
track: Jerry Lee Lewis’ “Breathless”, of course. He creates a little bubble of
fantasy right around himself – with cinematographer Richard H. Kline’s
telephoto lens flattening and encasing him in this magical sphere. The
Lewis-style piano rocks on … until suddenly this music track is snatched away,
and another (which has been bubbling away there, all along, underneath in the
mix) remains: a rearrangement of some Philip Glass keyboard arpeggios, topped
by a melancholic accordion.
Jesse holds out his arms and trembling hands to Monica
like a bridge, a tunnel, and she runs toward him, magnetically pulled: the
singularities of space, dynamised and electrified in
a superb mise en scène. But here come
the fatalities of time: Jesse’s song reaches its final exclamation (“You, you
leave me …”), he looks down at the gun on the ground between his legs, utters
(in three syllables across three rapidly cut shots, his arms air-guitaring a
power chord) “breath-less, ahhh” – and then makes his
final gesture. You’ll have to see the film yourself to discover it. Let us
merely say that it is an open, but definitely satisfying closure. And also one
of cinema’s greatest freeze-frames.
The movie that precedes this finale is one, great
spurt of energy – a “last chance power drive”, as Bruce Springsteen once sang.
McBride – who frankly declared at the time that he “likes to get some skin up
there on screen” – dishes up dizzingly erotic scenes
between his stars, and floods the soundtrack with everything from Elvis’
“Suspicious Minds” to The Pretenders’ “Message of Love”. Comic books,
rock’n’roll, street murals, dance parties, the classic film noir Gun Crazy (1949), Los Angeles beach culture – all is blended into this ode to physical
release and ecstatic emotion.
There is an army of depressingly staid, joyless cops,
bureaucrats, university professors and corporate types constantly passing
through the plot – but the lovers remain gloriously free and easy, even in the
face of certain death.
McBride is an underrated filmmaker with an unusual
career arc. He began, precociously, with the ingenious, ultra low-budget David Holzman’s
Diary (1967) – cooked up, like Breathless,
with his frequent collaborator L.M. Kit Carson, who also co-scripted Wenders’ Paris, Texas (1984) – and seems to have
ended with a musical tele-biopic about Meatloaf (To Hell and Back, 2000), an episode of Six Feet Under in 2001, and several subsequent low-profile shorts.
You can find out a lot about him in his partner and collaborator Tracy Tynan’s fascinating
memoir, Wear and Tear: The Threads of My Life (2017).
The 1980s offered McBride a shot at commercial success
with The Big Easy (1986) and Great
Balls of Fire! (1989), both fine, spirited films. But it is Breathless, along with David Holzman, that will win him his
lasting cult among cinephiles.
Oh, by the way, Wikipedia tells me that Breathless is a remake of a 1960 French film of (more or less) the same name –
“at the end of breath”! – directed by someone named Godard.
Being a completist film nerd, I checked it out for the benefit of my readers.
It’s not half as good as this one, I tell you. And its ending, by comparison,
is so weak – cool and ironic to a fault.
How much better it would have been if Jean Seberg could have run to her guy, screaming: “Michel, I
love you, Michel!” And if Jerry Lee Lewis could have battled it out with Philip
Glass on the soundtrack.
MORE McBride: The Wrong Man © Adrian Martin March 2013 |
