Sept. 12, 2002 - 2:01 am
a.k.a. Breathless. this is one of the utimate classic French films. if you've ever really studied film history seriously, you've most likely heard of this film. it's one of the main films of the French New Wave movement. this is sort of the figurehead film. it's the one that film historians like to say "best captured the spirit of the moment." or something to that effect anyway. i decided since i never got a chance to watch it in any of my classwork at UT that i should sit down and finally watch it. it was actually pretty exciting to watch.
the story is that a young man in France has recently decided to sort of model himself after what he thinks Humphrey Bogart is or should be like. after stealing a car and driving recklessly he gets pulled over by a cop. in a moment of random fear and excitement he kills the police officer. he then spends the rest of the film trying to convince the American girl that he's in love with to run off to Italy to be with him. neither person is very well-mannered or principled. they both sleep around quite often, are insincere with people and each other, and Michel is extraordinarily ruthless and unkind at times. their on-again/off-again romantic feelings for each other and the constant threat of police capture helps to keep you glued to the screen.
one of the big things that people talk about with this movie is the fact that visually it uses a lot of jump cuts and some very long takes with a handheld camera. these obviously were not standard at the time and that's why their appearance here is important. a couple of definitions in case you haven't heard those terms very often...a jump cut is where in editing you make a cut from one shot to another, except that the second shot is from the exact same angle, camera position, etc., and taken only a split second or a few seconds after the first shot ended. the effect is that you see something that was at one place on the screen seems to "jump" to another part of the screen. you don't see all the motion that was involved. the second thing is the long take. a take is when you don't use any editing devices like cuts or fades or dissolves and the camera is just rolling nonstop. for two excellent examples of long takes (meaning there are no cuts and the camera keeps rolling for a really long time), see the opening sequences of both Orson Welles' Touch of Evil (1958) and Robert Altman's The Player (1992).
i really enjoyed the plot of this film more than that of any other French New Wave stuff that i've seen. both of the leads played very intriguing characters. another thing i liked was that i noticed the sort of reverse attractiveness of the American girl Patricia's American-accented french. you get so used to hearing people from other backgrounds coming to America and speaking English with an accent. this time since it was in French, i could actually pick out how extremely different she sounded with her American accent. it was very attractive, probably the same way a French girl would sound speaking English. sorry, that's the first time i've ever been able to really understand how that works in the reverse order. i thought it was cool.