Screen:
Jr, Colin L Westerbeck
Screen SECOND WIND A TRUE ORIGINAL SINCE JEAN-LUC Godard's Breathless came out over two decades ago, I don't think a year has gone by when I haven't seen it at least once. On occasion I have seen...
...The film is endlessly protean...
...Keeping it in sight is a way I get my bearings with everything else I see...
...He is such a sexy, funny lover, such an appealing fugitive, that I couldn't help identifying with him...
...The brick wall waiting behind this illusion is the L.A...
...It's like having a friend of many years, somebody upon whom you have learned to rely, suddenly turn back into the irrepressible, irresponsible kid you first loved...
...he bounces around town crazily, trying to make all the lights light and the bells ring, to run up a huge score...
...Jesse is an urban sprite, a jive gadfly, a divine punk...
...Los Angeles is the perfect town for Jesse because it's full of illusions...
...That is to say, he still has the kind of response that's possible the first time you see it...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR.BECK, JR...
...At the same time, Jesse is up-tight, desperate, breathless...
...He leaves Vegas in a stolen Porsche as if he were a pinball coming out of the chute, and when he gets to L.A...
...The limitation of this movie is that McBride likes Jesse too much, and Godard not enough...
...it has been replaced by one that bears little resemblance to the original...
...He's the ultimate laid-back Californian, somebody who knows that if the deal doesn't go through-whatever deal he happens to be working on at the moment-he can always sleep in a park or on the beach...
...The main character who was played by Jean-Paul Belmondo has lost for McBride none of his immediacy, his startling appeal and crazy charm...
...No other film is as dense with meaning, as complex and durable, as this one...
...The movie I saw twenty years ago has completely disappeared now...
...Style requires an inventiveness to which McBride could never aspire, and it results in a sort of longevity his film will not attain...
...as a location to shoot against...
...has been covered in recent years allows Jesse to careen giddily from one illusion to another...
...When he's dodging the cops, there is a Hokusei painting a block long, or Botticelli's Venus in the gear of a roller skater along the front in Venice...
...Richard Gere plays Jesse Lujack, the hero of this Breathless , with a nervous languidness...
...On occasion I have seen it a half-dozen times in a month...
...McBride has somehow kept intact his pristine sense of the movie as just a wild, unlikely story that carries you along by sheer energy...
...The more I see Breathless, the more meditative and absorbing the experience of doing so becomes...
...The most dangerous illusion Jesse has is that a young architecture student he spent a weekend with, Monica (Valerie Kaprisky), is in love with him...
...McBride seems to have scouted out every wall painting in L.A...
...The only trouble with doing so is that if you begin believing in what you see, you could run smack into a brick wall...
...Twenty years later, McBride has an original response to Godard's classic...
...It continually re-creates itself so that every time I watch it it is new, different, surprising...
...police department, who are looking for Jesse because in his offhand, off-the-wall way, he's killed a cop...
...He steals cars as casually as the pinball player flips the flipper...
...When Jesse is driving, there are porpoises frisking behind him...
...What I like about Jim McBride's re-make of Breathless is that there is none of what I have just described in it...
...I find the film inexhaustible, as anyone who has read this column for a while knows...
...It's a way of sending himself back up to the top again for another ride down, keeping his game alive...
...Breathless is the one landmark of the medium's history to which discussion here frequently returns...
...The trompe I'oeil art with which L.A...
...The film that he has done is terrific, but it is less a re-make of Breathless than a knock-off of it, a rip-off...
...Since that experience of Breathless is the one I had lost, McBride's re-make of the movie is a real treat...
...The French film to which this one finally bears comparison is not the original Breathless so much as the recent Diva...
...With all its street-art backgrounds, this Breathless is, like Diva, a highly stylized piece of work...
...From the material provided by the script on which director McBride collaborated with L.M...
...Neither could McBride...
...McBride has hot-wired the Godard classic, and taken us for a ninety-minute joy ride...
...Kit Carson, Gere makes Jesse irresistible...
...Jesse is loose, easy, purposeless...
...But that is not the same thing as having a style all its own in the more substantial sense that Godard's film does...
...McBride's strength is as a filmmaker who can pick up locations as facilely as Jesse picks a lock or a pocket...
Vol. 110 • June 1983 • No. 12
