Pierrot le fou

When I brought up the musique concrète structuring of the soundtrack in A Woman is a Woman, my mind naturally wandered to the likes of Egar Varèse and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Yet the broadly playful nature of the construction reminded me less of Varèse than his chief disciple, Frank Zappa. Zappa and Godard aren't too distant from each other actually: both are symbols of '60s artistic innovation, both toe the line between a deep love for older conventions even as they smash them apart (after all, the cartoony nature of Woman's score isn't so different from Zappa's "doo-wop-ifcation" of Varèse) and both are two of the most readily identifiable iconoclasts of the 20th century.

If we continue to follow this logic -- a term I use so loosely you could bungee-jump with it -- we can line up certain releases from each artists, albeit without perfect chronology. Breathless, of course, corresponds with Freak Out!, a startling debut perhaps more noteworthy now for its impact than its lasting entertainment factor (though each is a great entry in its field). Band of Brothers, with its accessible grab-bag of Godard's invention, recalls Zappa's Hot Rats in its ability to draw in even casual observers without compromising anything. Pierrot le fou must then be Godard's We're Only in It for the Money, a vicious, off-the-wall blast of defiance that jumps down the throat of pop art and eats through its innards, tearing at organs and flesh until it at last bursts from the stomach like the xenomorph in Alien.

Les Carabiniers partially clued me into this, but Godard is at his best when he gives in to his wild abandon. As literate and formalist as he is -- and Pierrot le fou is one of his most literate and formal, despite its madness -- he's got too much of the romantic in him to play by the rules; when he compared directors to the arts (Eisenstein to dance, etc.) and declared, "the cinema is Nicholas Ray," he said more about himself than Ol' Nick. Pierre Schaeffer, who invented musique concrète, stressed the importance of jeu in composition. Translated literally, it means "play," and it connotes the same meanings as the English word, both in terms of playing an instrument and simply amusing oneself. With Pierrot, Godard fully embraces jeu as a method of writing -- though most reports claim that the director went in without a script and wrote as it happened -- and, as a result, he breaks free of the last vestiges of convention that held him.

That is why, when we see Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo, the nihilism he always hinted at now fully unleashed) at a party at the beginning of the film where he walks through shots of bourgeois guests speaking as if actors in an advertisement, all running through stiff promotions of invisible products, we need not concern ourselves with the political message. Yes, it's there, waiting for people to point out Godard's disdain for the commodification of the world, but what it really shows is his distaste for exposition and the scenes one typically needs to setup a story. Listen to Ferdinand interact with the great and irascible American director Sam Fuller, who describes the cinema: "Film is like a battleground. Love. Hate. Action. Violence. Death. In one word . . . emotion.” Ferdinand shrugs it off with a non-committal "eh," signifying that, as much as Godard loves Fuller, he has his own ideas, and he no longer feels the need to go along with his idols' vision as he fully trusts in his own.

We first see Belmondo in a medium long shot, sandwiched between cheap book stands outside a street vendor. We feel Ferdinand's dissatisfaction with life, and we sense Godard's as well, looking at the cheap commercialization of literature, reducing it to a means of passing time in the bathroom -- indeed, Ferdinand is reading in the bathtub in the next scene. The director places his films in the same league, his art simplified into a here today, gone tomorrow slice of French chic the way that Fellini's masterpieces were touted as a piece of Italian fashion. Ferdinand is clearly unhappy with his life, to the point that he leaves his wife and child for the babysitter, Marianne (Anna Karina), with whom he'd had a previous relationship.

Marianne serves as the catalyst for Ferdinand's rebirth, a violent, cathartic affair that doubles as Godard's kiss-off to whatever vestiges of convention and form still chained him. By 1965, Godard was not only still hung up on Algeria but concerned with the escalating situation in Vietnam, a cause abandoned by the French but picked up by the Americans without valid reason. The heat was rising in Paris, and Godard couldn't spend his time playing around in the sandbox of Hollywood genre pictures when far more important matters were right in front of him at all times.

Nevertheless, Pierrot le fou does, at times, play as a lovers-on-the-lam noir picture: after Ferdinand runs away with Marianne, he discovers that she's done something to anger Algerian gangsters, and their run from those sent to kill her turns into a crime spree. But the structure of Pierrot is something far more blatantly experimental: more so than in his previous genre pictures, Godard breaks up the narrative, not simply inserting shots of the characters pondering themselves and the world around them but editing together contrasting images, sounds and moods. At that party in the beginning, Ferdinand grows so tired of the conversation that he throws cake in a woman's face, and Godard smash-cuts to the image of a firework exploding.

Godard edits the picture as a collage of images across artistic media: Marianne's last name is Renoir, and Godard cuts to one of Renoir's paintings when we first hear her full name. Often, Godard shows us close-ups of other paintings, but he also cuts to images from cheap comic books. The director always understood that film can be either trash or high art, but here he crystallizes what he toyed with even in Breathless, that a film can actually be both at the same time. It features noir-esque voiceovers from its two leads, but they're played at the same time, interrupting and clashing with each other. Taking from Contempt's pop art aesthetic, Pierrot le fou's color scheme is based on primary colors, and the presence of secondary colors -- the pink dresses of Ferdinand's wife and, later, Marianne -- often signals disharmony. In a way, the film, with its nihilistic lovers plot, use of color tinting, postmodern structure and collage of styles and art, plays like a well-read version of Natural Born Killers.

With this paratactic setup, Godard crafts his most blatantly political film yet. As Ferdinand drives Marianne home at the start just before deciding to stay with her, she discusses the situation in Vietnam as a radio news bulletin announces the death tool of a failed Viet Cong strike and bemoans the fact that the dead enemies are reduced a simple number as a means of dehumanizing them. "They say '115 guerrillas,'" Marianne sighs, "and it doesn't mean a thing to us. Yet each one is a man, and we don't even know who he is." France had abandoned Indochina years earlier, but America had inexplicably taken up their cause for the vaguely defined need to curb communism. At one point, Marianne and Ferdinand run into a group of American sailors and decided to throw a play for them to get some money. "What kind of play?" asks Marianne. "Something they'll like," Ferdinand responds, and we then see the two acting out a racist farce, with Belmondo as a cocky Yank sailor (hilariously, he drawls out random words like "communist" and "New Yawk" and punctuates them with the odd "ya" like some old gangster) and Karina in yellowface yammering in a made-up Asian language. The Americans love it, and Godard cuts to a sign nearby, closing in on an "SS" in one of the words, emphasizing America's re-commitment to imperialism under the guise of protecting the world.

Godard also hasn't forgotten Algeria. The fact that the gangsters who come for Marianne and Ferdinand are Algerian and are incapacitated by the two French lovebirds shows the complicity of even the intellectual community in allowing the atrocities of the Algerian War to occur (there's even a waterboarding scene in the film, recalling Le Petit Soldat, Godard's first critique on the war). This is further complicated by the middle section of the film, following the couple's initial tear across France, in which Ferdinand seeks to settle down in the Riviera with Marianne and spends his days philosophizing. He does nothing with his intellect, choosing to hide away and prove his intelligence to himself while the world crumbles around him. Even Marianne grows tired of his self-absorption, eventually leaving him for another boyfriend.

Here the political and personal converge, and Pierrot unmistakably allows Godard to vent some of his anguish over the dissolution of his marriage to Karina. I deeply resent, however, the shockingly reductive assessment of the film by Richard Brody, whose article appears in the accompanying Criterion booklet, that "Pierrot le fou was an angry accusation against Anna Karina, and a self-pitying keen at how she destroyed him and his work." Brody's piece is often sharp and points out some terrific quotes from the artist about his thought process behind the film, but this summary is so lunk-headed, so regressive and so downright simplistic that it makes Godard out to be some sort of petulant teenager even when Brody later marks it as the "herald of even more radical rejections and reconstructions to come."

Yes, Karina's character lures Ferdinand into a life of crime. Yes, she breaks him out of his comfortable life in nature to bring him back to the corruption of modern civilization. But she rips him out of his denial to see the existence he leads. He's no less doomed at the end of the film, after he kills Marianne in a jealous rage and ties dynamite to his head in anguish and regret, than he was at the start, shuffling from party to party listening to the doldrums of "The Age of the Ass," as Ferdinand dubs their current, ad-dominated culture. And if anything in the film can be said to directly comment on the relationship between Godard and Karina, it must be the moment where Marianne voices her displeasure with Ferdinand: "You speak to me in words," she says, "and I look at you with feelings."

It would be foolish to separate Godard's personal connection to the story from the film, but the clearest objective here is clearly the desire to reconfigure his art toward politics, even in the aesthetics. The opening credits appear alphabetically, the letters of the film, leads and director appearing slowly as the As flash on the screen, then the Bs and so on. It's as if Godard is learning how to do this all over again, like a child learning the alphabet. When the entire title card appears, the names drop out, leaving only the film's title. Then, all the letter but the Os disappear, leaving behind what appears to be a rudimentary pair of eyes. One of the Os vanishes, leaving but that last letter, suddenly made to look like a return to zero. Like a Japanese swordsmith with steel, Godard constantly refines his films, folding over ideas and styles to refine them, occasionally breaking apart what he's made to further check for impurities. Japanese swords were the most durable and sharp of the medieval world, and Godard has at last combined and strengthened everything into the first film of his I would unreservedly call a masterpiece.

It is almost certainly counterproductive to Godard's hyper-literate writing to say this, but I didn't start to like him until I just sat back and let his films happen to me, instead of wracking my brain over references I don't even know anyway. Pierrot le fou, despite being the most aesthetically and thematically dense of his films to date, happens also to be his most playful and inviting. For all its nihilism, it carries an unabashed romanticism, with its frequent asides to nature and particularly the sparking ocean. The popular rumor concerning the film's production states that Godard had no script until they started shooting, but Karina insists that every scene was well-planned, even obsessive in its detail. With this film, both might be true. The film ends, after its chaotic self-destruction, with one final look out on the sea, as the disembodied voices of the two lovers speak one last time. "It's ours again," says Marianne. "What?" "Eternity." This is not the work of a jilted lover; it is a loving kiss-off to the genre filmmaking Godard had outgrown, one last sarcastic but wistful look at American and French pop culture (a love of American cars runs through the picture) as Godard moves into a new style of filmmaking, one that actually doesn't veer too far from Fuller's assessment of film. Where Fuller conveys his emotion through blunt, visceral speech, however, Godard uses Pierrot to communicate through images and sound. "Two or three years ago I felt that everything had been done, that there was nothing left to do today," Godard later said. "After Pierrot, I no longer feel this. Yes. One must film everything — talk about everything. Everything remains to be done."

A Woman is a Woman

A Woman is a Woman is an effervescent delight, revealing its director loosening up after using his first film to attack the stale conventions of the cinema and his second, repressed for three years by the French government, to comment on the Algerian War still being fought. It pushes the director into that most Hollywood of genres, the musical, to see how this enfant terrible would treat a genre he dearly loved, just as he overhauled the gangster picture with Breathless. The result is something I've not yet seen with Godard, something that has peeked shyly from the periphery in his other earlier works but never been fully coaxed into the open: pure magic.

Godard teased his acolytes by describing the film as a "neorealist musical," two words so wildly opposed to each other that they seem less oxymoronic than paradoxical. He adopts a musique concrète approach to the "showtunes" -- for lack of a better word -- splintering Michel Legrand's score into blasts of brass instruments, lilting woodwinds and suspenseful strings that jut into scenes before ceasing abruptly. At times, the music overwhelms the dialogue, at others it cuts out and takes the rest of the audio track with it. There's not much singing in the film, but Godard lays music over the speech, highlighting its melodrama and deliberately creating artifice while speaking to the true emotions of characters who spend the entire film lying to each other almost against their will.

They lie because they're in love. Angela (Anna Karina, who refines eyelash batting into an artform), a striptease artist, suddenly hears the ticking of her biological clock and asks her lover Émile (Jean-Claude Brialy) for a child. He refuses, so she turns to their mutual friend Alfred (Jean-Paul Belmondo), who routinely pledges his love for her, to get the job done. In between, the two men argue with Angela over her flightiness and petulance, while she brushes it off and persists in the pursuit of her desires.

Like Contempt, A Woman is a Woman devotes a sizable amount of time to a couple engaged in bitter warfare, yet the fighters here are evenly matched. Émile is a chauvinist who responds to his girlfriend's rhetorical question, "Why is it always women who suffer" by saying that women cause the suffering and even condescendingly instructs her on grammar. He never gives reasons for not wanting a child, only resorting to cruel insults at Angela's insistence. But, for her part, Angela is manipulative and impatient. She doesn't know why she wants a child but comes to demand one. When Émile castigates her for her profession, she retorts that his paltry salary couldn't support them both (a gender inversion of a similar materialistic argument in Contempt), neglecting to realize that pregnancy would put her out of a job as a stripper. She leads both of the men in her life on, exploiting their attraction to her. Early in the film, she sings a sultry tune as she strips, lingering briefly on the line "I can be a real devil" before the color lighting projected on her by the establishment for some cheap "artistic" effect paints her in red.

But her ability to twist men around her fingers and Émile's sexism belie their true feelings for each other. Text appears on the screen in the midst of their argument, telling us how much the two care for each other; when the other is just out of earshot, one character will whisper an apology and a declaration of love, only to return to the insults when the other pops back in and says "What was that?" Godard beat Pat Benatar to the "love is a battlefield" conclusion by 20 years, suggesting that relationships are constant struggles between people who argue incessantly for no reason (that he married its star during production adds another facet to this).

At times, as usual, Godard dips into sexism, though he always does enough to balance the straightforward presentation of his misogyny to convince me sufficiently that he's making a more complicated point. Angela mentions her distaste for "modern women" who don't cry in an attempt to make themselves "more like men," yet she says this as an aside in her elongated rant against her lover's inferiority complex at her being the real breadwinner thanks to a job that somewhat emasculates him. As she eats lunch with Alfred later in the film, a lament comes on the jukebox with the lyric, "What did I ever see in you?" and Godard cuts directly to Karina looking straight into the camera. Is this a commentary not only the character but on Karina herself (after all, something in the relationship took a turn for him to script Contempt partially as an apology to her)? Or does the song, sung by a man, actually reflect Karina's thoughts as she looks at her real-life lover with a look of mild bemusement?

Her mere presence slices most of my arguments about any possible sexist content to ribbons. There's something preternaturally hypnotic about Anna Karina. It's not merely that she's beautiful -- which she certainly is. She is simultaneously innocent and fiendish, someone to be both pitied and feared. She's an ingénue who every so often reveals bigger stones than the rest of the men combined. Had Karina come of age in America in the late '90s, she could have played the Fred role on Angel. Hell, she probably would have been Joss Whedon's muse the way she was Godard's for a time. You're never quite sure where you stand with her and her character, which is precisely where Godard wants you.

Karina looking into the camera is but one of countless examples of the film's giddy self-reflexivity, which makes the winking in Godard's other early works seem formalist in comparison (there is literal winking to be had here). Belmondo carries over his essential cool by attempting to cut through Angela and Émile's argument by reminding them, "Breathless is on TV. I don't want to miss it." Who couldn't see Michel watching his own demise, secure in the knowledge that he'd become an icon like the Bogey poster he worshiped? Belmondo even makes a crack at his stardom by suggesting a movie playing at the theater by facetiously mentioning it stars his "pal Burt Lancaster" before flashing the dopiest grin you ever did see at the audience. The existentialism that defined Breathless pops up here and there, such as a bit of text placed on-screen in such a way that the word "is" (est, for you Francophiles) appears by itself. Heck, before Angela and Émile begin their first major argument, Angela instructs her lover, "Before we start this farce, first bow to the audience" and they do, beaming right at us until you can't help but smile back.

Godard's first color feature offers a striking contrast to what was then his only other film of reference, the hand-held, full-framed, monochrome Breathless. Raoul Coutard uses verité camerawork here as well, but the wide-screen of CinemaScope gives him the chance to introduce more formal shots. Godard does not use CinemaScope against itself here as he did as protest in Contempt, and the pop art decor of the apartment offers relief from the weary, working class drab of the Strasbourg-St. Denis area where the movie was filmed. Not yet has Godard turned against it as a part of the problem of bourgeois commodification of art that he hinted at in Contempt. Really, if there was any benefit to watching Contempt first, it's that I get much of what I liked about that film -- albeit without the stronger message about the right of women to cast off the yoke, a message that clouds the background of some conversations but never fully condenses here -- without the occasional tedium of what was essentially Godard's (often justifiable) bitch session against the ignominies he suffered during that production.

"Is this a comedy or a tragedy?" asks Alfred when he finds himself in the middle of the lovers' spat, and for much of the film it's hard to answer that question. A Woman is a Woman is certainly funny, with its giddy disregard for the rules and Godard's willingness to tease himself (Angela and Émile grab heaps of books off their shelves to use their titles to lob insults at each other, a cheekily simple way to use Godard's literary memory). There's one brilliant segment just before the two start to really argue in which Angela realizes she's burnt dinner and needs to prepare something to make her request for a baby as smoothly received as possible. She asks if he wants meat or fish, and when he says "fish" she replies without missing a beat, "What would you have preferred if you were having meat?" until she manages to guide him into choosing beef. But what makes a comedy is a happy ending, and Godard ties in those text scrolls that confirm the couple's love with their outward arguments, using his jump cuts to leap merrily from sniping to reconciled kissing and back again and again. The movie even ends with a pun, as the couple reunite and agree to try to have a baby, and Émile can only marvel, "Tu es infâme!" ("You are shameless"). Karina turns to the camera and replies, "Non, je suis une femme." A Woman is a Woman lacks the ambition and historical import of Breathless and Contempt, but its overall lack of pretension and its uncanny ability to tap into the true spirit of the musical genre while it tears down conventions -- Godard giving Alfred the surname Lubitsch, after the legendary comedy/musical director Ernst is not ironic but reverential -- makes it the Godard film I cannot wait to revisit.

Breathless

I have seen Jean-Luc Godard's debut Breathless four times now, each time struggling to reconcile the parts of it I absolutely adore with the parts I simply admire, as well as a few bits I find wearisome and self-absorbed. This likely doesn't bode well for me when I at last move beyond this film into the work of perhaps the most independent and unpredictable major filmmaker of all time, but perhaps sticking with this one until I finally came to some sort of understanding will make the transition into his more difficult works easier. Or, focusing so much on this one might sour me against him when future films don't follow the same tropes I spent so long working through. C'est la vie.

With each viewing I found myself liking it more and more, but even now I'd stop short of calling this a timeless treat as enjoyable now as it was the day of its premiere. What I can say is that, after seeing a number of older films in the interim, I can at last admire its revolutionary technique. As with Citizen Kane and The Birth of a Nation before it, Breathless didn't necessarily introduce all of the various tricks displayed throughout its running time but collected every bold technique out there, added its own innovations, and the result altered film language forever.

Perhaps that's what makes Breathless so difficult to younger viewers like me (though I'm sure many young cinephiles are sharp enough to pick up on it a lot quicker than me): Breathless is one of the touchstones of film history. Everything after it changed, and its influence has been so thorough that even cheap blockbusters rip it off routinely -- just look at the sloppy, frenetic editing of most action films; even if they're poorly done, they owe a debt to this arthouse picture.

That strikes me as appropriate, though. Breathless, along with the rest of the French New Wave, was born out of an appreciation of American B-movies, an appreciation that inspired polemical, often poetic, reviews in Cahiers du Cinéma. Godard, Truffaut, Rivette, they all cut their teeth not with their own films but through complete dissections of the sort of movies that most would shrug off as trashy kitsch. Breathless opens in fact, with a title card dedicating the picture to Monogram Pictures, a prolific maker of gangster movies throughout the '30s and '40s. References to films abound in Breathless, most of which fly straight over my head, but Godard also namechecks artists, literature and philosophy, making the movie a pop culture explosion of hipster chic.

Though it has little story to speak of, Breathless nevertheless sports a brilliant structure. Godard simply gives us our protagonist, Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo), sans introduction or setup. For the first five minutes, the camera darts along Michel's misadventure: he steals a car, speeds along the motorway, is pulled over by a motorcycle cop, whom he kills. This all happens in five minutes; the only way you'd see a murder in earlier cinema was if it opened with a murder and then flashed back to solve the case (i.e. Sunset Boulevard, The Maltese Falcon), and maybe to set up a villain. But this is the guy who drives the story!

Michel flees to Paris to collect money owed to him by partners in past robberies (about as much as we're ever going to learn about the character's past) in order to pay his way to Italy. While in the city, he tries to win back his American girlfriend Patricia (Jean Seberg), studying in Paris on a visa even though she looks like the most natural fit for Godard's hip presentation. Her striped shirt, short hair and dark glasses are damn near the first image that comes to mind when someone says "Parisian," which makes her American background all the funnier. In their conversations, both reveal themselves to be arrogant, clueless youths, the only difference between them being Patricia's naïvete comes with the innocence that it's supposed to connote.

The first 25 minutes or so of the film play out in a jump-cutting frenzy. Though Godard later become the enfant terrible of French cinema, his editing techniques arose not from artistic statement but necessity. The original cut of Breathless ran at two hours and was deemed too long to be a commercial hit (because length was really what kept Breathless from being commercially viable) by the financiers. So, Godard simply went to the editing room and cut pauses in between lines and action. A conversation between Patricia and her boss at the Paris bureau of the New York Herald-Tribune is so chopped-up it's a wonder that the images don't end three minutes before the dialogue. The resultant breakneck pace certainly gives the movie a breathlessness. At the 27-minute mark, though, the action shifts from the dizzying jump all over Paris, following both characters separately, to Patricia's cramped hotel room.

Godard spends a good 20 minutes in the room, almost as much time as everything that came before it. He still uses jump cuts -- especially in a hilarious series of ellipses of the two having sex -- but by confining the action to this one tiny spot he conveys the existential worries of the characters, their narrow, close-minded assessment of the world, and the mounting police pressure bearing down on Michel. Had this section alone been the whole film, I'd have probably called it a masterpiece from the start. Spending 20 minutes in such a cramped set, without once conjuring the feel of a theatrical play, is no small feat. The sequence perfectly balances Godard's camera tricks with an interesting look at these characters. When they eventually head out into the streets again, I can't help but see it as a bit of a come-down even though Godard ratchets up the pace even more.

The rest of the film strikes me as breaking the rules just to break them, which is admittedly a negative in retrospect, after the broken rules helped launch a, well, new wave of filmmaking style and film grammar. On his reckless drive through the countryside, Michel speaks directly into the camera, and when he pretends to fire a pistol, it makes a gunshot noise anyway. When the cops come looking for Michel, we see them depart in a car through the reflection in Patricia's glasses. A news scroll on the side of the building near the end reads "Arrest of Michel Poiccard in Paris now imminent" is not an announcement within the diegetic world but to us, to let us know that the inevitable conclusion is coming. The jump cuts are meant to distract, but they can be simply too much at times, violating so much continuity that I momentarily lose my footing, and regain it only for the film to jump to the next point of action.

In these bursts of celluloid, Godard packs in stated and visual nods to that which inspires him. Patricia hangs a cheap copy of a Renoir painting in her room and tries to sell Michel on William Faulkner. Later, they slip into the theater to see Budd Boetticher's Westbound. A reference is made to "Bob Montagne" of the film Bob le Flambeur, only for that film's director, Jean-Pierre Melville to appear as a celebrity novelist. But Godard, to his credit, uses a number of the more obvious references to flesh out his characters. Patricia sits among a throng of interviewers shouting out question's to Melville's novelist, who ignores her inane, vague, hollow questions. When he finally addresses her empty, "What is your greatest ambition in life?" he responds with an equally empty sarcastic response, "To become immortal, and then die."

Michel flat out defines himself by the references. He stands in front of a Humphrey Bogart poster and runs his thumb across his lips just like Bogey. He plunders the retro style of the gangster to craft his identity; a young girl hawking (hilariously) Cahiers du Cinéma asks, "Monsieur, do you support youth?" to which he gruffly replies, "No, I like the old." Michel can flick cigarettes into his mouth, but it's a hollow gesture of cool, just like the character. As much as Godard likes the idea of the American gangster, he recognizes the lie of the persona. Michel must die in the end not because he committed a crime and must be punished for it (as was the practice of the Hays code), but because his lifestyle left no other plausible outcome.

For that reason, Breathless is both a celebration and (to steal from Jonathan Rosenbaum) a criticism of film. He, along with other Cahiers writers, championed the "trashy" side of American cinema because its filmmakers tended to be the true artists, the ones then-perceived as amateurs by the mainstream because they didn't know how to follow the "rules" when really these were auteurs with artistic visions. Breathless commends the contributions of the film noir genre to cinema, but Godard uses documentary-like footage courtesy of cinematographer Raoul Coutard (who had to haul around a heavy 35mm camera for long takes through the Parisian streets) to approach the references from the POV of an outsider looking to examine them. After four viewings I can finally say that I see Breathless as a charming little feature, one with a bold style, not to mention some great black and white cinematographer, especially given the circumstances of the shooting style and film stock used. It's also a fun takedown of its hipster protagonists, even if the movie focuses on its handling of these characters more than the characters themselves at times. But hey, I'm finally willing to shell out money for a copy of my own, even if I'm in no rush after seeing it four times in the last year.