Breathless (1960)
Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Had I seen this before: Yes, but I only remembered it as being about an annoying French guy trying to sleep with Jean Seberg
So as it turns out...this is mostly about an annoying French guy trying to sleep with Jean Seberg! I guess now that we've arrived at a Very Important Classic Film That Changed Everything it's time to issue my disclaimer that I'm not true cinephile who is fluent in the academic language of film, I'm just a knucklehead who watches a lot of movies and occasionally tries to understand some film history and context. You will discover in my next post that I have a pretty hit-or-miss knowledge of directors, for example. So I try to mix quite a few older, often foreign, "important" things into my trashy American movie diet and sometimes I absolutely love those things and sometimes they are just not for me. I've beat my head against so many Ingmar Bergman films, I can't even tell you. Anyway, I recently watched a different Godard film and spent most of it feeling like I was in college again but in all the bad ways, so I thought I would try returning to the original hit and see if I could finally mine the elusive gem that is French New Wave. Or at the very least get some beauty shots of midcentury Parisian cuisine to replicate. Right?
Well...non. Unfortunately, all anyone consumes in this movie is cigarette smoke and the heady scent of their own bullshit. It's about a très disaffected young Parisian man and a string of inexplicably bad decisions that lead to his downfall over the course of one day and the fact that he sill somehow manages to spend about half of the film in full Pepé le Pew mode. It's not that I think the film is necessarily endorsing this particular approach to life--the very first line of the movie is "After all, I'm an asshole" so it's not like I wasn't warned! But I just found spending time with this guy almost unbearably tiresome. Even when I was a young person I was not really a "live fast die young leave a corpse with a smug expression and a cigarette hanging out of its mouth" kind of young person, and of course I have not in this current lifetime ever been French, so maybe that's why I struggled to connect with these characters. I guess lines like "I don't know if I'm unhappy because I'm not free or if I'm not free because I'm unhappy" might have resonated with 20-year-old Erica? She was a little bit melodramatic sensitive and poetic.
But I don't think the relentless misogyny would have resonated, even in the early 2000s when relentless misogyny was the style du jour. Sooooooo much of the runtime of this movie consists of the main character complaining about women and then calling Jean Seberg's character "mean" and "a coward" because she is not currently having sex with him. She is also sexually harassed by a big important author while trying to do her job as a journalist. And by a fellow journalist, come to think of it. And it doesn't seem like the movie thinks this is a problem, it's just evidence in the case that the main character is building that "Two things are important in life: for men, women; for women, money." And I know that I am currently even less receptive to, uh, men's very deep philosophical thoughts about what's wrong with women than usual, but it's like...I'm just so glad you're here to shake up the uptight establishment with your youthful energy and new ideas, young Frenchmen! I tip my hilariously oversized hand-rolled cigarette to you.
Fine, some things I appreciated: it obviously has a sense of style. The music, the aesthetic, let me check my notes here...ah yes, it just says "Paris 1960" with a bunch of little hearts drawn all around it. I would actually love to hang out in these cafés and apartments by myself or perhaps with some French people who do not insist on being so aggravating at every turn. I liked when the main character broke the fourth wall in the beginning. I liked when one character just fondled a model airplane for no reason while being questioned by police. I liked when Jean Seberg said "Qu'est-ce que c'est l'horoscope?" I wanted to cut off all my hair and wear flats and ride around in a Cadillac and look ennui-stricken for the duration. I kept feeling myself trying to generate good will for the characters just by siphoning off the pulsing energy of the setting.
Line I repeated quietly to myself: "Je suis fatigué. Très fatigué."
In conclusion: Am I supposed to be sad at the end? Amused? Angry? Is it because of my inferior female brain that I just could not summon any feelings at all about this man or his fate?
Chocolate Soufflé from Martha Stewart and Easy Spinach Soufflé from Allrecipes
As I mentioned before, no one in this film takes in any sustenance aside from a couple of gulps of milk near the end. Even when someone orders a coffee it is ignored and abandoned. These people, I swear. I therefore decided to honor the original French title, À bout de souffle, with a couple of breathy concoctions that I could stagger away from very dramatically.
So if I'm being honest, I figured that by doing one "real" soufflé and one "shortcut" soufflé, there was about a 5% chance that they would turn out equally light and airy and I would never again waste my time going through the proper egg-separating steps and a 95% chance that I would demonstrate exactly why it is not a waste of time to go through the proper egg-separating steps. Alas, l'horoscope de soufflé did not smile on us this day, mes amis.
Now, did I hedge my bets by making sure that the successful soufflé was the chocolate one, rather than the spinach one? And that the chocolate one was significantly larger? Oui, and I will not be taking further questions at this time.
Up next: Confirmation of my long-held suspicion that Ed Harris is secretly controlling everything around me
