Jim McBride’s ‘Breathless’: To Live and Die in L.A.

“I still don't understand why Mr. McBride and Mr. Carson elected to do the film but, considering the more obvious possible pitfalls, they could have done a lot worse. That is meant to be praise.” — Vincent Canby, The New York Times

“The trousers that Richard wears in that movie are quite simply mind bending. The checks are particularly spectacular. And for a large section of the movie, he does run around wearing just the trousers as if to say, ‘I’m not wearing these trousers by accident. I’m wearing them on purpose. Pay close attention to the trousers’.” — Mark Kermode, Kermode Uncut

It was an objectively ludicrous idea to anyone, especially an American director, to shoot a remake of Breathless, Jean-Luc Godard’s seminal French New Wave classic. There was simply no constituency for such an enterprise: Godard disciples are notoriously protective of the director and his legacy, and would likely be hostile to any riff on his most famous work. Commercial audiences would not be keen to accept the level of deconstruction and abstraction necessary for any movie with the audacity to call itself Breathless. That the film opened to middling reviews and passable box office in 1983 is an impressive achievement, all things considered, though much of that may be due to its star, Richard Gere, who did have a constituency after lighting it up in American Gigolo and An Officer and a Gentlemen. 

Time has proven to be much kinder to the 1983 Breathless, however, because it picked up prominent champions like Quentin Tarantino, who clearly saw it as a model for his own Godard-inspired mode of L.A.-based pop deconstruction, and it stands as a particularly vivid commentary on this period in American filmmaking and culture. The ’80s are understood as a retreat from the restless experimentation that defined the previous decade, when a generation of young mavericks took over Hollywood like inmates running the asylum. That retreat isn’t evident in this Breathless, which may not engage in the jump cuts and non-diegetic sound that made Godard’s film so formally radical, but doesn’t exactly play by the rules, either. Beyond that, it’s such a flavorful depiction of time and place that its background is nearly as compelling as a foreground that features two of the most beautiful bodies you’ll ever see on screen.