À bout de souffle - Jean Luc Goddard

aka "Breathless", directed by Jean-Luc Goddard, and written by Francois Truffaut.

A young car thief kills a policeman and tries to persuade a girl to hide in Italy with him.

I liked the 400 Blows, which is written by Traffaut. I liked the Band of Outsiders, directed by JLG. The former because there's nothing to dislike about it, and the latter because it's a film that thrived with the style it was given. It was entertaining.


46 minutes into this film or so. I can't be bothered. It's so much style over substance, and the only style I was getting was watching people piss about in a bed.


The girl tries to make conversation. Music. Literature. The guy's a philistine, I get it. He just wants her for sex, I get it. The male character doesn't say anything. It's so cliché, so dull. Same with half of the film I saw. You can't waste half a film portraying an empty character. Goddard's female characters are always vulnerable, educated, but socially stupid. Even that gets monotonous: the same recycled character.


It's just style. Too much sugar in a bad cup of coffee. Trendy, yet overly weak. At least give me something decent to read, some interesting character development, something absolutely beautiful to look at. I got none. I don't really care if the latter half of the film suddenly improved or somehow crammed in a load of character development -- or anything relating to substance.

I drink coffee without sugar because I like to be able to taste it. Did I mention it was lukewarm? This guy's like the French Woody Allen.

Robert Bresson

"Robert Bresson was a French film director known for his spiritual, ascetic style."

Recently, I have been fascinated by this director's work. Bresson was born in 1901, or 1907, apparently, this differs depending on the source. This alone tells you there is going to be an interested life behind the man, and there is. Namely, it's that he was a POW during WW2, and spent 18 months in the camp. This experience went on to inspire his first film, A Man Escaped.

You may find my entry on Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest, which was my first Bresson experience, and ultimately a bad one. This was mainly due to the religious nature of the film, which I found extremely difficult to relate to. I just didn't appreciate delicate nature of his work. I do think about that film, and how the priest's character is so unparelleled, the characterisation, the acting, and the narrative tools Bresson employs have had an affect on me, because there's nothing quite like it.

I have now seen Balthazar, and Pickpocket. I can tell you that I hope to rewatch Diary of a Country Priest, perhaps after seeing more of Bresson's catalogue. I thoroughly enjoyed both of these films, Pickpocket especially, and hope to make posts for both.

After reading and watching interviews, and seeing the two aforementioned films, I can say agree that Bresson's artistic focus is to separate the theatre and the stage performance from his actors. He uses non-professionals to portray his themes, and I've never seen anything so natural by the lead actor in Pickpocket, nor have I seen such a natural way of portraying themes in film.

A lot of people have called Bresson "anti-expression", but I disagree, it's this very subtle use of emotion in his actors which works remarkably with the themes he portrays in his films. He explores themes in the realms of salvation, redemption, and ultimately, the eminence of Bresson's work does what I think all art should strive to do, to try and reveal the human soul via metaphysical ascendancy, which Bresson proves we can only do by stripping away "performance", the almost materialistic commercialism behind cinema, namely the way actors act, as if it on a theatre stage.

It's the pure elegance of his work, where every frame is vital to the film, his reconstruction of the actor's role in cinema, it's this cultivated, graceful approach that leads to such a dominating impact of art that leave me in awe.

Le Samouraï

The Samurai is a French film directed in 1967 by Jean-Pierre Melville. It's described as a minimalist crime thriller. There's not much action, there's no car chases, or shoot-out scenes, or any of gang$ter lifestyle crap. A few gunshots as you could expect, but the dialogue, especially from the protagonist, hardly exists. I've felt when this has been tried before it's been fairly gimmicky, but other aspects of the film's style save it, such as a good soundtrack and atmosphere.

The guy on the cover image is a hired killer. The film opens with quite a long take of him smoking on his bed. That didn't really set the mood for the film either, but initially tells you, this film is either going to be boring, or have style. I thought it might be a French Get Carter, but it wasn't. That's where "minimal" comes into it.

I could name drop a lot of films that have been inspired by this film. The film looks at a lone wolf character. The guy doesn't say very much, but carries the character superbly. Without realising, you would feel that anything you've seen before in "gangster" films was done here first. This is about as authentic as a gangster film gets. It's the opposite of Goodfellas and co. Quiet young guy, doesn't have any friends, isn't using profanity for punctuation, isn't drinking copious amounts of alcohol.. He's wearing a hat and a raincoat.

Throughout the film, he's not actually getting away with crime and G'ing it up. He has the cops and other people after him. One review even called this "existential". You'll see why at the end scene. I wasn't expecting anything profound from this at all. That is pushing it though -- who can relate to a hired killer? Hardly insightful. I bet a reviewer has said something about us all being able to relate to him because our society pays us for our survival, etc, etc.

To conclude, a very stylish, influential film that instead of concentrating of portraying greed and the luxury lifestyle of a criminal shows us a lonely guy living in a one bedroom apartment, with a budgie, and manages to do all of the former in as few words as possible.