Breathless (1983)
MGM DVD (region 1)
d. Jim McBride; pr. Martin Erlichman; scr. Jean Luc-Godard, LM Kit Carson, Jim McBride; ph. Richard H. Kline; m. Jack Nitzsche; ed. Robert Estrin, Rachel Igel; cast. Richard Gere, Valerie Kaprisky, Art Metrano, John P. Ryan, James Hong, Miguel Pinero (101 mins)
Introduction
Jean-Luc Godard’s original 1960s film of Breathless is hailed as one of the masterpieces of the French New Wave and a monument that is thus critically unassailable.
When director Jim McBride announced his intention to remake and Americanize this cinema classic, many were duly outraged. Indeed, whatever the merits of this remake, it will forever be compared to the original and, sadly, usually by the people who resent Americanizations of international films. McBride was an untried talent at that point and eagerly sought to attract a major actor for the lead role. Amongst the actors so wanted were Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, Gary Busey and John Travolta. None of these choices eventuated and the role went to Richard Gere, then a proverbial “hot property” thanks to the enormous success of American Gigolo. Gere would work extensively on his character and the script, so much so that McBride refers to the film as a collaboration. For an added sensuality in what was intended as a sexual and sultry movie, nineteen year-old French model Valerie Kaprisky was selected. Her scenes with Gere, and the full frontal nudity, caused an outcry amongst conservative groups and the film became something of a controversial talking point upon release. Still, it could not shake the lingering debt to Godard, even if the majority of audience members the remake connected with were unfamiliar with its borrowings and revisions.
Synopsis
In Breathless, Richard Gere stars as a drifter in Las Vegas, obsessed with Marvel Silver Surfer comic books and the rock ‘n roll music of Jerry Lee Lewis. One day, Gere steals a car, intending to drive to Los Angeles.
As he drives and looks through the owner’s possessions, he discovers a gun in the vehicle. Soon, as he has been speeding, a police car tails him and he pulls over. His attempt to hide the gun, however, has disastrous consequences and he flees the scene of what is now a crime. In Los Angeles, he seeks to re-acquaint himself with a college girl (Valerie Kaprisky) he met in Vegas. She is captivated by this reckless American and resumes her affair with him. However, she has plans for a job and Gere resents the implication that her potential employer may sneak her sexual favors away from him. His jealous instability is tempered by his growing realization that his crime has been reported in the media and that he is now a wanted murderer, the police already on his trail of associates. Indeed, soon the police trace his involvement to Kaprisky and begin to question her. She is somewhat conflicted, aware of Gere’s instability but drawn to his sense of risk and danger. Thus, when Gere proposes to her that the two of them go off to Mexico she is tempted to throw her beckoning “normal” life away and pursue a prolonged romantic / sexual fantasy with this reckless man.
Critical Comment
From the outset, Gere states that he is jinxed. His contagious energy and drive can be interpreted as an attempt to stave off the horror of societal stagnation.
Correspondingly, his animal sexuality is an expression of his illusory sense of self (sustained entirely by his odd empathy for throwaway pop culture Americana). As that segues into romantic delusion, he attaches himself to Kaprisky; needing to believe that it is their love that sustains him above all else, her love that keeps him there when he should flee. He is a narcissistic, doomed, amoral romantic – an unpredictable but desperate man who finds definition in his own relentless driving energy. Yet what he is running from is perhaps a realization of his own failure and alienation from the contemporary world. He can identify only with comic-book tragedy and the romanticism of the anti-hero. Thus, Breathless emerges as a portrait of the personal failure of this kind of particularly American romantic anti-hero, goaded by dreamy pop-culture delusions into ultimate self-destruction. With much of the film unfolding as a kind of rock and roll fable, it is also intriguing to note that it is Gere’s delusion, his belief that with Kaprisky by his side he is truly unstoppable, that essentially entraps rather than liberates him. Far from a loner, he desperately seeks connection but can do so only on a level derived from romantic pop-culture fantasies of the alienated tragic anti-hero.
Gere’s refusal to be tamed in turn cannot be tolerated by the forces of conventional law and sexual morality – to which his amoral energy is an affront – and he must be pursued.
In his self-imposed opposition to the world of American order, he is a dizzying attractant to Kaprisky, who is drawn to the invigorating relentlessness of Gere as an alternative to the world of responsibility that she is poised to enter. She is torn between the cold reality of contemporary sexual politics and the genuinely passionate romantic anarchy of Gere. She too is thus lured into his fantasy of passion, energy and escape even though she knows the obstacles in her path. Indeed, it is she who finally sees the inevitability of the world of order and morality consuming the destructive and doomed if gloriously defiant rhetoric of Gere’s all-or-nothing credo. For Gere, it is as if being “breathless” is to be truly fearless. It sustains his need for invincibility as he is driven by an unattainable ideal of “love” which is validated in his mind by Kaprisky’s presence. In that respect the film is about a man’s flight from a stagnant reality that he simply cannot accept, making the unusual film indeed one of the decade’s more involving, and much maligned studies of a man on the run. On his part, director Jim McBride is successful in his attempt to Americanize this material and sets his future career agenda in the interest on alternatives to convention.
DVD DETAILS:
Vision
The transfer is effective, but is unfortunately presented in fullscreen only and often has a greasy and grainy look. In terms of color and lighting, the film frequently juxtaposes a vibrant, escapist and stylized luridness with gritty urban reality.
Energetic camera movement captures Gere’s relentlessness and how the world would seek him to stop, constrict or slow him down. The use of costume suggests the relationship between Gere and Kaprisky as a collision of different worlds and the film captures the sexual allure of the unpredictable as represented by Gere. Back projection effects, color and stylized camera angles deliberately evoke the lush melodramas of the 1950s (especially Douglas Sirk) and the artificiality is again constantly juxtaposed with authentic Los Angeles locations, making for a dynamic visual style based on impending clash. Gere’s empathy with the Silver Surfer makes for some intriguing scenes in which the character is allowed something of a philosophy, however based it is in super-hero tragedy. The film has a grimy physicality and some very orangey skin tones although the sex scenes between Gere and Kaprisky are intense and varied (the most telling being a scene in which an old movie is projected behind them). Teasing use is made of both of their physiques as Gere fleetingly appears in full frontal nudity in a shower scene (predating Bruce Willis’ revelations in Color of Night).
Sound
The sound transfer is quite capable, at times having a nice overlapping quality. However, it is available in Dolby Digital mono only and in a film in which rock music plays such a vibrant part, this is a drawback.
CLASSIC MOVIE TAGLINE: BREATHLESS
“He's the last man on earth any woman needs – but every woman wants.”
(Richard Gere has been known to make women Breathless)
Although the overall sound design is rather sparse, the use of songs does add tremendously to the film’s sense of both meaning and propulsion. Indeed, the energy of Jerry Lee Lewis is effectively used (and director McBride would be so taken with Lewis that he would make the bio-pic Great Balls of Fire, about an amoral man paradoxically morally ahead of his time). However, apart from the energy of Lewis, at other times the song selection adds an undercurrent of melancholy: the contrasting moods capturing the manic nature of the character (a psychology Gere would essay again in the later Mr. Jones). The pop songs represent knowing choices and there is a motif of the function of “love” in American popular culture which the music helps to sustain. However, although the escapist energy of the music’s hold on Gere is well captured, so too these heightened, escapist interludes must subside as the ordinary, ordered and stagnating world intrudes on the stylized realms. This sense of broken pop-culture fantasy runs throughout but the bland transfer fails to make as much out of this collision between reality and heightened perceptions infused by pop-culture as DVD really would allow for.
Special Features
In the way of special features are an original trailer and an informative fold-out collector’s booklet offering some background into McBride and the film (and is the main source for some of the introductory material above as the film has seemingly been forgotten or ignored in most critical circles). Multi-zone collectors should note that the Australian region 4 DVD release of the movie reportedly boasts an anamorphic widescreen and stereo sound transfer and thus would undoubtedly be preferable to the US region 1 release.
