‘Breathless’: Running on Adrenaline

The camera in “Breathless” jumps all over the place, as if director Jean-Luc Godard’s cinematographer was hyperventilating, maybe breathless himself.

It was just one of the unconventional stylizations that freaked critics of the day. Many hated the 1960 movie, some calling it a lurid mess of technical ineptitude. Newsweek’s headline over a meager review just said: “What Is It?”

Ah, the shortsighted views of the film establishment.

“Breathless” (screening Friday as part of UC Irvine’s “Tragedy and Comedy” series) was reappraised in later years and has since become a milestone; it may be the most famous, if not the best, example of the French New Wave movement.

Moviegoers today may still be thrown off by its defiance of tradition. There is little of Hollywood’s quest for seamlessness and lack of ambiguity in defining relationships and events. What there is, is Godard’s compulsive vision of things, his desire to redefine filmmaking through often chaotic imagery.

The entire picture is driven by a strange adrenaline that seems counter to our customary expectations: The camera jerks about. The editing is erratic and choppy. The lighting is naturalistic, meaning uneven and blotchy, and the story, even with its dramatic push, moves, as one critic noted, “like an engine with a bad piston.”

But “Breathless” elicits a perverse fascination, even when it feels too arty for its own good. Besides, the picture has Jean-Paul Belmondo in one of his most amusingly rude performances and, better still, Jean Seberg in the role that fixed her as the queen of the French cinema’s anti-Establishment.

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The film starts off like a goofy, insouciant road picture, with Belmondo as Michel, a petty hood driving a stolen car. While cruising, he talks directly to the camera about this and that, smugly showing he doesn’t give a hoot about the reality ready to confront him.

When a couple of motorcycle cops chase him down, Michel kills one of them. He then spends the rest of the movie trying to raise money in several seedy Parisian quarters so he can get out of town, hopefully with his girlfriend, Patricia Franchini (Seberg), an American expatriate who sells Herald-Tribunes on the corner and wants to be a journalist.

There’s a lot of wry talk (mostly by Belmondo) in Godard’s screenplay (based on a story by Francois Truffaut) about the troubled relationship between men and women, and art and culture, mostly American. There’s a windiness to it all these days, but the straightforward dialogue must have seemed intimate and revealing in the ‘60s.

Godard is revealing when Michel attempts to define himself through American archetypes and his desire for Patricia. Michel’s allegiance to Bogart is a statement of his own contrived image of himself (Woody Allen used the same idolatry for comic relief in “Play It Again, Sam” in 1972), and his fascination with Patricia is, at least in part, rooted to his psychological separation from life in Paris.

Our fascination with Patricia is very different, of course. She’s the street waif with sex appeal, even under the handicap of a severe Joan of Arc hairdo. When she blithely checks herself out in a storefront mirror, she fairly beams with freshness.

* What: Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless.”

* When: Friday, Feb. 11, at 7 and 9 p.m.

* Where: The UC Irvine Student Center Crystal Cove Auditorium, Campus Drive and Bridge Road.

* Whereabouts: Take the San Diego (405) Freeway to Jamboree Road and head south to Campus Drive and take a left. Turn right on Bridge Road and head into the campus.

* Wherewithal: $2 to $4.

* Where to call: (714) 856-6359.