French movie cool goes under the hammer

The film is a crime caper starring Jean-Paul Belmondo as Michel, an insouciant young crook on the make, and Jean Seberg as his American girlfriend. The title means “out of breath” in English though it’s known to Anglophone cinemagoers as “Breathless” and there’s something heady and rarefied about the film, with its wandering, unhurried shots and bright, jazzy score. A myth sprang up that the freewheeling Godard hadn’t bothered with a script at all, so this document, which has been in the family of the film’s producer, Georges de Beauregard, for 65 years, is little short of a cinematic revelation.

Before principal photography began, Godard had been working as a critic for the influential French magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, which was full of moody failed poets and femme fatales, who sat around all day drinking Pernod and misquoting philosophers. At the time, French cinema was dominated by studio-produced literary adaptations which prized glossy storytelling over innovation. Godard and his cronies found these productions stiff and phoney. The director preferred to write his dialogue on the day of the shoot, so the actors would be as natural as possible. 

Not only that but it was his habit to destroy his manuscripts as soon as he was finished with them. So the 70 or so pages of screenplay from Breathless are a remarkable property: the only known surviving manuscript from the film, and signed by the director himself.

Many of the most memorable scenes are sketched in these pages. They include the opening credits, the sequence in Marseille that introduces the character of Michel, in his homburg and houndstooth jacket, and his return to Paris in a stolen car. Among the yellowed, hand-written notes is Michel’s reverie about the many charms of his homeland, concluding with the pungent exclamation: “If you don’t like the sea… or the mountains… or the big city… then screw you!”

In Godard’s hand, we see the stage direction for Michel entering a telephone booth, for him knocking over a police motorcyclist, as well as for Seberg’s character as she wanders up the Champs Élysées, selling copies of the New York Herald Tribune. Studying the script reveals fascinating discrepancies between what Godard planned and what ended up in the finished movie: some scenes and dialogue were added and others removed.

Pauline Kael, the film critic of the New Yorker, said of Godard and Beauregard, “It’s as if a pair of movie-mad Frenchmen took a banal American crime novel and wrote down the poetry between the lines.” 

Godard didn’t disagree. He said, “It was a film that took everything the cinema had done – girls, gangsters, cars – exploded all this and put an end once and for all to the old style.” Breathless had a huge impact on later film-makers. It influenced Bonnie and Clyde (1967) as well as Easy Rider (1969) and Paper Moon (1973). The opening scenes of Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973), with all those jump cuts are also a homage to Godard’s picture, and Quentin Tarantino has cited the film as an inspiration of Reservoir Dogs (1992).

Anne Heilbronn is head of books and manuscripts at Sotheby’s, Paris, where the script will be auctioned from June 14. “Without the tenacity of Beauregard, who found it difficult to finance the film, it would never have seen the light of day,” she says. The manuscript “brings together two of the great forces behind the Nouvelle Vague, in a historic document that captures the birth of one of France’s greatest cinematic exports.”

“I read in Sight and Sound that I was improvising, in the style of the Actor’s Studio, with actors who are told: you are so-and-so, so act accordingly,” Godard once remarked. “But Belmondo’s dialogue was never invented by him. It was written: only, the actors didn’t learn it, the film was shot in silence and I would whisper the lines in their ears.”

Stephen Smith is a journalist and broadcaster