The other thing is, you can never forget Paris. Films like Breathless – and, say, Agnès Varda’s Cleo de 5 à 7 (1962)m – serve, amongst other things, as moving symphonies to the City of Love. They capture Paris at a moment when it was beginning to slough off the humiliation and guilt of wartime Occupation, but had not yet been fully reinvaded by McDonald’s and Starbucks (although The New York Herald Tribune, which Patricia is seen hawking on the streets, vies for attention with France Soir).
In Breathless, Paris is shot handheld, on the fly (and without crowd control or filming permission), both a zone of reportage and a playground for Godard’s games with genre and gender. The black-and-white still photographs that Raymond Cauchetier took of the production in 1959 (recently collected in Raymond Cauchetier’s Nouvelle Vague) have also helped cement the place of both Godard and Breathless by catching in motion their convention-flouting process, and converting the filmmaker’s spontaneous approach to something icon(ograph)ic.
From the flirtation and friction (expressed in national, cultural, political and sexual terms) between Patricia and Michel, there emerges an edgy, equivocal romance that epitomises ‘the cool’ – and much as the cool is always backward-looking (note Michel’s adoration of his sartorial muse Humphrey Bogart), Breathless lays out a model of outlaw hipsterdom that abides, precisely and paradoxically, because of its datedness.
If Michel is a man on the lam, always fruitlessly trying to stay ahead of the curve that is cresting over his back, he is now ossified in that posture, forever living fast, forever dying young and forever giving expression, in his final breath, to a disgust that is not fully articulated, or indeed understood.
With that general dissatisfaction comes rebellion against the prevailing dispensation – a deconstructive spirit with which any new generation can easily identify. Yet Michel’s delinquent recalcitrance is in – and is defined in – its complicated dialectic with the (relative) conservatism that Patricia pursues to secure her own future.
Essential to what makes Godard’s film seem not only so temporally and culturally specific but also so timeless and universal is the way that it gazes, Janus-like, backwards and forwards. It barrels along, but keeps one eye ever fixed on the rear-view mirror – which is how we all roll.
Raymond Cauchetier‘s New Wave will be exhibited at James Hyman Gallery, Savile Row, from 17 June – 14 August. Cauchetier‘s book New Wave is published by ACC Publishing Group, available now. Details here.
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