The Big Screen (54 page)

At the very end, when Doinel escapes from reform school, he runs forever with the steady company of a tracking camera. But then as the boy reaches the sea—it was shot near Villers-sur-Mer, in Normandy—and runs down the sloping beach, the camera backs off and adopts a very beautiful track that is more lyricism than scrutiny. The boy steps into the sea, turns, and the film ends on a freeze frame as he gazes at us and wonders about the future.

Les Quatre Cents Coups
was always a heartbreaker and a crowd pleaser—and Truffaut was never really comfortable if not winning an audience over. Previews were so good the Cannes Festival got word of it and persuaded André Malraux, minister for cultural affairs, to make it an official French entry. The irony was not missed that in 1958 Truffaut had been denied press credentials to Cannes because he was such a troublesome, aggressive critic.

Truffaut and Léaud arrived at the Carlton Hotel without so much as a poster for their film—and Cannes has always been a marketplace. Already the picture had been sold to America for $50,000, enough to cover the production budget. It screened for the festival on the night of May 4, 1959, with Jean Cocteau, the president of the jury, as host. There was great applause, and Jean-Pierre Léaud, in a rented tuxedo, was carried aloft out of the theater. Truffaut won the Best Director prize. The press went wild, from
Le Monde
to
Elle
, which proclaimed, “Never has the festival been so youthful. So happy to live for the glory of an art which youth loves. The twelfth film festival has the honor of announcing to you the rebirth of French cinema.”

It opened on the Champs-Élysées on June 3, and 450,000 tickets were sold that summer. By November it was playing in London and New York. (It got an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay, but it was one more film trounced by
Pillow Talk
.) Truffaut's income multiplied by a factor of twenty. He bought a sports car and felt he was like James Dean.
Les Quatre Cents Coups
remains a true and sweet film, with enough of a sour edge on the sweetness. By the end of 1959, Truffaut was shooting
Tirez sur le Pianiste
, with the singer Charles Aznavour, a figure in French show business. And every would-be filmmaker decided that Truffaut was like them.

As
Les Quatre Cents Coups
opened in Cannes, Jean-Luc Godard was kicking his heels in Paris. “It's disgusting,” he told an acquaintance. “Everyone's at Cannes. What the fuck am I doing here? I've absolutely got to get the money to go down there…Truffaut is a bastard, he could have thought of me.”

The two men had been allies at
Cahiers du Cinéma.
They saw film history in the same light. They had codirected a short film together in 1958,
Une Histoire d'Eau
, and Truffaut had once told Godard a simple story—about a thief who kills a cop and tries to hide out in Paris with an American girlfriend. Godard thought it might make his own feature debut. So he raided the petty cash at
Cahiers
and caught a train to Cannes. Once there, he told the story to Georges de Beauregard, a producer, and got Chabrol and Truffaut to assure de Beauregard that he could use their names—“story” by Truffaut, with Chabrol as “artistic supervisor.” Beauregard was agreeable but he had no money. So Godard went to a film financier, René Pignières, and won a promise of around $100,000, because the business was suddenly alert to these kids in the excitement of
Les Quatre Cents Coups
.

Godard was born in Paris in 1930, but most of his childhood and youth was passed in Switzerland, at Nyon, where his father, a doctor, had taken the family when Jean-Luc was four. He entered the Sorbonne planning to study ethnology, but he spent his time watching movies. In the early 1950s, he visited America, to avoid military service, and then worked his way back into the
Cahiers
group. He was never as readable a critic as Truffaut, but he was often inspired, aphoristic, and abrupt. From the outset, it was likely that Godard would not be content to work as a regular storyteller, or as a director fond of his own characters. As a young man he had stolen from his family, including a Renoir painting, which he sold for funds.

The story of
À Bout de Souffle
, or
Breathless
(1960), was as Truffaut had suggested, and no one remembers seeing a full script. Instead, it was pages or bits of paper delivered sometimes day by day. Raoul Coutard was hired as cameraman. He had done hardly anything previously and he was asked to film as simply or as directly as possible—no lights, handheld, nothing much in the way of equipment or crew—in a vérité manner. Coutard had too much natural feeling for light and motion to be as visually brusque as Godard wanted, but this was a film in search of a radical reappraisal of moviemaking. When the look proved too gentle or pleasing, Godard would embark on a savage editing to deconstruct the old fluency or pleasure.

He had promised the lead part, Michel, to Jean-Paul Belmondo, and he talked the actor out of a bigger picture on offer in return for a mere $800. For the American girl, Patricia, however, he suddenly thought of an American star, or a quasar, who happened to be there in Paris. Jean Seberg had been discovered in Iowa in the hype of a national search by Otto Preminger for someone to play the lead in Shaw's
St. Joan
. She was the one, from among eighteen thousand, who got the part! Many critics felt the role was beyond her, but Preminger—tough on her in person yet saving face in public—then took her to France to play the lead in his film of Françoise Sagan's 1954 novel
Bonjour Tristesse
. And there she had flowered, moving in the one picture from an awkward adolescent to a precocious but fatalistic young woman, and winning this ecstatic review from François Truffaut:

This may be the best review she would ever receive, and it must have helped persuade her to do
Breathless
. (She had sent a thank-you letter to Truffaut.) But Seberg had been trained in Preminger's Hollywood. She found Godard “an incredibly introverted, messy-looking young man with glasses, who didn't look me in the eyes when he talked.” She didn't think Patricia was likable in any way and she believed an actress's characters should be sympathetic. But her new husband, a French lawyer, François Moreuil, negotiated a full quarter of the film's budget for her, so she said she would do it. The shoot wasn't reassuring. The film was full of talk, but all the words would be dubbed in later.

“I'm in the midst of this French film,” she wrote to a friend, “and it's a long, absolutely insane experience—no lights, no makeup, no sound! Only one good thing—it's so un-Hollywood I've become completely unselfconscious.”

Yet here was a picture where Belmondo's character begins by trying to imitate Humphrey Bogart as seen in a movie poster. And surely Patricia was meant as a bridge to the international market and because Godard was fascinated by Hollywood actresses, American girls—and what François could see in them. (Jean-Luc was never that generous to players.) As a critic, he had been devoted to American style—to Nick Ray, Sirk, Fuller, and the other
Cahiers
auteurs. As Richard Roud put it (and this fits so many crime films over the ages), “
À Bout de Souffle
was modeled much more on
Scarface
[Howard Hawks, 1932] and other American thrillers than on any direct knowledge Godard had of the underworld milieu.” It's not just that Belmondo aims at the would-be American hoodlum with such existential zest; Godard is there in support, urging on the nihilist assault on moribund European values.

When the film was edited it proved too long and too slow: not much happens in stretches of sophomoric talk that are timid or evasive about sex.
Breathless
promised a blunt confrontation between attractive kids. It had a prolonged bedroom scene, under the sheets, yet Godard showed no instinct for having “it” happen on camera. Hitchcock's
Psycho
—a film of the same moment—was far sexier, far more voyeurist.

So to make its length manageable, Godard the cutter invaded his own film, showing a kind of contempt for his flimsy story and the whole scheme of narrative or moral development. He refined/degraded his own movie, letting jump cuts intervene where smooth editing once ruled the day. It was as if he was sneering at the viewer: you're not actually watching this as if you believe it or care, are you? But enough viewers responded to this curt treatment for a revolutionary style to be acclaimed and regarded as modish.
Breathless
played at ninety minutes and it felt like a revelation. In a seven-week Paris run in the spring of 1960, it sold more than 250,000 tickets. It won the Prix Jean Vigo and made a profit of fifty times the budget. Then it became an international sensation. Observers outside film felt compelled to comment. Jean-Paul Sartre said it was “really very beautiful.” Referring back to Alexandre Astruc's essay of 1948, proposing the “caméra stylo,” Gerard De Vries said
Breathless
was a full-fledged work made in that approach.

The truth was more complicated and less organized. Godard's deconstruction of a narrative film's form was not too far from those American films of 1959 that were abandoning narrative sincerity for parody or an explosive camp reappraisal. But
Rio Bravo
and
Some Like It Hot
still ran smooth; their subversion lay in their ironic attitudes. Godard sensed more, spurred on by the anthology called television, where the audience had seen everything—so make it different. In advance of the remote-control device for self-editing with television,
Breathles
s had a scattered dynamic that said, next, next, hurry on. More than telling a story,
Breathless
had the world-weary attitude “let's get this over with,” and so the film was always plunging toward the last blank look on Patricia's face as the dying Michel tells her she is “dégueulasse.”

A few years later, talking about
Pierrot le Fou
(1965), Godard admitted, “The Americans are good at story-telling, the French aren't.” He added that by the mid-1960s a great film almost had to be based on a misunderstanding, or something done by accident. The old grammar of film narrative, he felt, was archaic and useless. But “everything is possible on television.” More or less, people watched that screen in the way they observed life, bored yet expectant. So he concluded that he wanted
Pierrot
to be not so much a film “but an attempt at film.”

He was a theorist, but a careerist, too. As if aware how he had outflanked Truffaut and Chabrol, and left them looking old-fashioned, Godard the deadpan opportunist and chronic word player started to do interviews. There's a comparison with the Beatles here: their radicalism lay not just in the freshness of their music—tough as well as lyrical—but in the indifference they flaunted in interviews. No one had talked to the press like that before; no one had taken their own fame and said, look, it's stupid. Not that the Beatles or Godard were free from the pleasure of being hits. Godard could be dismissive one minute and charming the next; his own evasiveness was a kind of cutting. He could say that his film was really just his film criticism applied by different means—it was an “essay,” an analysis of a process that had to change fast now to keep up with the unstable culture. But then, talking about
Breathless
, he could slip back into being the art student in love with artiness: “For a long time the boy has been obsessed by death, he has forebodings. That's the reason why I shot that scene of the accident where he sees a guy die in the street. I quoted that sentence from Lenin, ‘We are all dead people on leave,' and I chose the Clarinet Concerto that Mozart wrote shortly before dying.”

Godard liked to seem unreachable and superior. He wore dark glasses most of the time. He tried to be impassive. He spoke lucidly but in a monotone—there was something of Alpha 60 there already, the all-knowing computer from
Alphaville
(1965). But the new movie order he was introducing should not conceal his own disarray—European yet besotted with Americana, emotional but cold, an avant-gardist but eager for movie hits to surpass the rest of the gang. The confusion was intensified once he met Anna Karina, and his work took on an emotional force that he would not regain without her.

Hanne Karin Blarke Bayer (her real name) had come to Paris from Denmark as a model and perhaps an actress. Godard had considered her for a small role in
Breathless
, but it required that she bare her breasts, and Anna Karina (the professional name she adopted) was reluctant to do that. So Godard pursued her for his next film,
Le Petit Soldat
(1963). He even put out an advertisement suggesting that the actress in the new film might end up his lover. There was a recognition all through the New Wave that even on a shoestring budget you made movies to get girls. Karina said she didn't like Godard much at first, but she took the part and then they were inseparable—until they separated.

In the next few years, Godard embarked on one of the most creative periods in the history of film. One by one he made pictures that took the surviving genres and ideals of American film and broke them apart before our eyes:
Le Petit Soldat
(a political thriller),
Une Femme Est une Femme
(1961, a romantic comedy according to Lubitsch),
Vivre Sa Vie
(1962, a woman's picture),
Les Carabiniers
(1963, the war film),
Le Mépris
(1963, a movie about movies),
Bande à Part
(1964, the young gang),
Une Femme Mariée
(1964, a woman's picture with sociology),
Alphaville
(1965, science fiction, or liberty threatened by occupation),
Pierrot le Fou
(1965, a noir in full sunlight, escape leading to death),
Masculine-Féminine
(1966, sexual politics),
Made in U.S.A
. (1966, noir),
Two or Three Things I Know About Her
(1967, prostitution and society),
La Chinoise
(1967, world politics, infant Marxism),
Week-End
(1967, automobiles, society equals traffic, the crash as destiny). Karina was in seven of them, made before and after their breakup.

That remake scheme isn't tidy or exact: as always with Godard, the cynicism spilled over into the romanticism. Montage meant interruption and self-contradiction; it allowed anything you could think of. Moreover, in the years of Godard's surge, there was a sexual revolution, the onset of Vietnam, the aftermath of Algeria—its independence was gained in 1962—and the discovery of torture, an era of assassinations, the growing disquiet with the United States in Europe, the use of drugs (though that was always missing from the ruthless sobriety of Godard), the dawn of feminism, and the flooding of a culture by television, to say nothing of the decline of conventional Hollywood confidence. This would also build toward the events in France of 1968, the attempt at a revolutionary alliance between students and workers, the street demonstrations, and the government attempt to remove Henri Langlois from leadership of the Cinémathèque Française. Plus the marriage between Godard and Anna Karina broke up. These newsreel items may seem obvious, but you will not find them in Truffaut or most other filmmakers of the period.