The re-release of the classic film, "Breathless," for its 50th anniversary, marks a lot more than the passage of a half-century and a startling message of aging for some of us. The movie makes us look at changing tastes, and values, but it remains a great, ground-breaking film while it reminds us that classic story-telling is the key to classic films. "Breathless," which opens here today, began a rich career for writer-director Jean-Luc Godard and actor Jean-Paul Belmondo, probably hastened a slide into the tragedies that followed Jean Seberg (1938-79) for the foreshortened remainder of her life.
The tale of Michel Poiccard (Belmondo) the amoral, conscienceless young criminal and murderer, living by his wits in Paris while attempting to re-seduce Seberg, collect some debts and evade the police, is similar to many cops-and-robbers stories made before and since. But Godard provides an attitude, one that has permeated the genre ever since, and those who call "Breathless," the first film of the French "new wave," probably have made their case. Godard is one of the icons of the movement, and Francois Truffaut, who wrote the original story, is another.
Seberg was only 22, and already had scored big in two previous movies ("Saint Joan" and ''Bonjour Tristesse") when she portrayed the short-haired, hedonistic Patricia Franchini, first seen hawking the International Herald-Tribune on the Champs-Elysees. She also has an attitude, and remember, this is in the sober, buttoned-up 1950s.
The story plays out as it must, and even though there's some sex, with almost no bare skin, there's no language to equal that of sound tracks today (I admit I don't speak much French and do not know if the subtitles were sanitized). And yet, in his review in the New York Times, fim critic Bosley Crowther called it filled with "gross indecencies."
Times certainly change, but great films remain great.
Opens today at the Tivoli
--Joe
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