Breathless: Godard's Fragmented Vision of Filmed Sexuality

Introduction: Fragmentation and Emotional Truth

The thesis advanced by Riesz and Millar regarding Jean-Luc Godard's 1960 film Breathless may seem complex on its surface. In its most basic form, however, the authors argue that Godard's decision to fragment the conventional logic of his film's narration communicates more emotional truth to the viewer than a linear narrative of the same "cops and robbers" plot ever could. Through sharp juxtapositions of fragmented images, a more intense emotion is produced in the viewer. Paradoxically, the less realistic the means of telling a story, the more "real" its impact and emotional effect.

In this context, "realism" refers not to how lived reality is experienced but to truth — namely, the emotional texture created. The entire film exists, for the viewer, as if "in quotes": the viewer is constantly forced to question his or her assumptions because he or she is never permitted to enter an alternate, apparently real fantasy world. The unreality of filmed life is stressed, and the viewer is thus compelled to confront the constructed nature of his or her own reality once Breathless comes to an end. As Riesz and Millar write of Godard's editing approach, the editor is essentially saying that "the habitual idea of screen continuity is merely an illusion which is in any case subsidiary to the communication of the scene's meaning."

Plot Overview and the Limits of Melodrama

The story of Breathless follows Michel, a car thief who steals an automobile in Marseilles and drives it to Paris. Stopped for speeding along the way, he shoots a policeman. In Paris, while attempting to collect money from a friend, Michel encounters an American girl named Patricia. This chance meeting leads to the film's longest dialogue sequence, set in Patricia's Paris hotel room, where Michel tries to convince her both to sleep with him and to run away with him to Italy.

Michel succeeds in seducing Patricia, but she ultimately turns him in to the police. He does not flee; instead he waits, and in the final confrontation — after a friend throws him a gun — the police shoot Michel dead. On its surface, the film's plot is melodramatic. Yet because of Godard's unconventional filmmaking techniques, the viewer's attention centers not on the crime story but on the relationship between the Frenchman and the American woman. The two connect physically and intellectually but not emotionally, a failure evidenced most clearly by Patricia's decision to betray him.

Quotation, Disconnection, and the Hotel Room

Rather than directly discussing their situation during the extended hotel room sequence, Michel and Patricia engage in a series of quotations that substitute for real communication. In the scene before they sleep together, for example, Patricia quotes William Faulkner's The Wild Palms: "Between grief and nothing I will take grief." Michel responds, "I'd choose nothingness. Grief is a compromise. You've got to have all or nothing." Patricia grounds her supposed life philosophy in an American literary source; Michel's reply echoes the outlook of French Existentialist philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus.

As the two characters debate, the camera cuts briefly to posters by Paul Klee, Renoir, and Picasso hanging around the hotel room. These fragmentary images mirror the fragmentary lives of the characters themselves. The fragmentary nature of the depicted sexual interplay leading up to their eventual lovemaking underlines how little the two really know about one another. All they truly share are superficial quotations from "great" authors — the relatively brief and transitory aspects of themselves they offer each other, despite their apparent artistic pretensions, communicate nothing of real depth.