Jean Seberg in À bout de souffle. Les Films Impéria / Les Productions Georges de Beauregard /
Société Nouvelle de Cinématographie (SNC)
After her debut in Hollywood, with her first role, at age nineteen, in Otto Preminger’s 1957 Saint Joan, and another Preminger movie a year later, Bonjour Tristesse, this one filmed in France (both poorly received), Iowa-born Jean Seberg appeared in Jean-Luc Godard’s directorial debut, À bout de souffle (1960). Breathless came out after the first films of other three emerging New Wave film-makers, Agnès Varda’s La Pointe Courte (1955), Claude Chabrol’s Le beau serge (1958) and François Truffaut’s Les 400 coups (1959), but, with Truffaut as screenwriter and Chabrol as technical advisor, it was Godard’s film that marked the definitive breakthrough towards a new language of cinema, one that went against any cinematic conventions, and brought in a new aesthetic, innovative techniques, bold and vigorous narrative, improvised dialogue, leading us through the streets of Paris, mingling actors with passers-by, in a frenetic and realistic pace similar to that of a modern day reporter.
A Paris where two lovers are overwhelmed by fate and where the image of Jean Seberg as Patricia Franchini strolling down the Champs-Elysées in The New York Herald Tribune t-shirt became an everlasting style headline and the star of the French New Wave. À bout de souffle would have an impact on fashion and beguile international audiences to this day. The French New Wave films exquisitely captured the life of the young in France and especially in Paris, the fashion, the urban professional life, the ideological struggles, the carefree minds, the spirit of youth.
À bout de souffle film poster
It was a film de cinéphile, Godard said. “Our first films were all films de cinéphile – the work of film enthusiasts. One can make use of what one has already seen in the cinema to make deliberate references. This was true of me in particular. I thought in terms of purely cinematographic attitudes. For some shots I referred to scenes I remembered from Preminger, Cukor, etc. and the character played by Jean Seberg was a continuation of her role in Bonjour Tristesse. I could have taken the last shot of Preminger’s film and started after dissolving to a title, ‘Three Years Later’. Godard was indeed first and foremost a cinephile, and when he went from the front of the camera as editor of Les Cahiers du Cinéma, to behind the camera as a film-maker, he frequently made allusions to his director peers whom he admired. There are many “film in film” sequences in À bout de souffle, such as the one when Patricia hides in a cinema, the famous Le Mac Mahon, from the police, and the show that they are announcing next is Preminger’s very own Whirlpool (1949).
“À bout de souffle was the sort of film where anything goes: that was what it was all about. Anything people did could be integrated in the film. As a matter of fact, this was my starting point. We are living on the Champs Elysées. Well, before À bout de souffle, no film showed what it was really like. My characters see it sixty times a day, so I wanted to show them in it. You rarely see the Arc de Triomphe except in American films.[…] What I wanted was to take a conventional story and remake, but differently, everything the cinema had done. I also wanted to give the feeling that the techniques of filmmaking had just been discovered or experienced for the first time.”
Raymond Cauchetier, the film set photographer, also known as the photographer of the New Wave, will confide that “everything or almost everything was improvised. We were shooting in the streets, in hotel rooms with just a few lamps illuminating the ceiling, without direct sound recording. Godard wrote his dialogues on a bistro table and whispered their text to the actors during takes.” The method pleased Jean-Paul Belmondo, but was disliked by Seberg.
Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo in À bout de souffle. Les Films Impéria / Les Productions Georges de Beauregard /
Société Nouvelle de Cinématographie (SNC)
“I improvise, certainly, but with material which goes a long way back,” revealed Truffaut. “Over the years you accumulate things and then suddenly you use them in what you’re doing. My first shorts were prepared very carefully and shot very quickly. A bout de souffle began this way. I had written the first scene (Jean Seberg on the Champs-Elysées), and for the rest I had a pile of notes for each scene. I said to myself, this is terrible. I stopped everything. Then I thought: in a single day, if one knows how to go about it, one should able to complete a dozen takes. Only instead of planning ahead, I shall invent at the last minute. If you know where you’re going it ought to be possible. This isn’t improvisation but last-minute focusing. Obviously, you must have an over-all plan and stick to it; you can modify up to a point; but when shooting begins it should change as little as possible, otherwise it’s catastrophic.”
Raymond Cauchetier captured through his lens enduring moments that Godard’s shoot only implied. There is a scene on the Champs-Élysées, filmed in long shot and from overhead, in which Godard has Seberg give Jean-Paul Belmondo a sweet peck on the cheek. Cauchetier brought the actors together to reproduce the scene in a close-up, which became one of the movie’s iconic images despite not existing in the film at all. Cauchetier caught the film’s immediacy and free-form style, as well as the star power, ease and effervescence of Seberg and Belmondo throughout the shoot.
Ramond Cauchetier’s shot of Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo that did not appear in the film but became iconic.
Les Films Impéria / Les Productions Georges de Beauregard / Société Nouvelle de Cinématographie (SNC)
That ease is spoken through their costumes, too. The film does not credit any costume designer for the wardrobes. It is very likely that Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg made their own sartorial choices or even wore their own clothes on set – the late ’60s, only a few years later, would mark the beginning of the reign of the stylists in film wardrobes, choosing rather than designing the outfits. But in the French New Wave films, actors usually wore their own clothes – the whole cast of Vivre sa Vie wore their everyday clothes, except Anna Karina, Godard recounted, for whom they bought a skirt and a sweater. La nouvelle vague displayed an aestheticism that was very fresh, very modernist, the new French.
Belmondo set the standard for smoky French sex appeal, with his naturally lively and exuberant acting style, so different than the Belmondo we would see in Melville’s films, for example, where his expressions were more subdued and restrained, as Denitza Bantcheva, writer of Jean-Pierre Melville – de l’œuvre à l’homme, remarked. “In À bout de souffle I was looking for a theme right through the shooting, and finally became interested in Belmondo,” Godard explained. “I saw him as a sort of block to be filmed to discover what lay inside.”
Seberg, with her infusion of French chic into her American sporty, preppy style (just like Seberg in real life), finally made a big entrance on screen and would be admired and copied by the worldwide public for generations to come, creating the stereotype of the French gamine. She is all light and cool and mischief. Patricia Franchini, an American student working for the European edition of the New York Herald Tribune in Paris, made style news with her pixie haircut, black eyeliner and an effortless, natural, carefree, fresh wardrobe packed with sailor stripes, oversised men’s shirts, ballet slippers, loafers, trench coat, skinny trousers and a Trilby hat borrowed from Jean-Paul Belmondo’s Michel.
Jean Seberg in À bout de souffle. Les Films Impéria / Les Productions Georges de Beauregard /
Société Nouvelle de Cinématographie (SNC)
In a rare interview talking about the movie, taken just before shooting a scene in À bout de souffle, Jean, dressed in the striped dress that Patricia wears in the film, Seberg depicted her character as “a very franchised American girl, a very sophisticated American girl, I suppose what some would call a very liberated American girl” and further concluded that she was one of the first Americans to speak French in a French movie. Belmondo was one of the anti-heroes of La nouvelle vague and she was the anti-heroine of this new cinema that had new life in it, that questioned the establishment, that wanted to experiment in new ways with everything.
Years later, Godard would confess that he felt he had missed the realism, the concreteness in À bout de souffle and considered Une Femme est une femme his first real film, just as he considered Jules et Jim to be Truffaut’s first real film. That does not whatsoever take anything from what he achieved with À bout de souffle and the huge impact the film has had on cinema from then on. Hardy anyone could have said it more simply and better than Henri Jeanson: “I love this movie and I’m jealous of it. It is the first film of revolt of the French cinema and of cinema in general. Tell me if you love À bout de souffle and I’ll tell you who you are.”
Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo in À bout de souffle. Les Films Impéria / Les Productions Georges de Beauregard /
Société Nouvelle de Cinématographie (SNC)
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