a bout de souffle (no new wave no fun)
qu’est-ce que c’est à bout de soufflé?
eons ago i abandoned a hideous film class i was taking. sickened of godard and renoir and welles by weeks of overanalysis, scene by scene breakdowns and repetitive deconstructions that pretty much spoiled the magic for me. haven’t watched citizen kane or la regle du jeu or week end since. so out of curiosity and figuring thirteen years was long enough, i trundled along to see à bout de soufflé on the big screen.
and by god, it’s still ace.
i guess what i love about it (now and on first viewing) is its musicality. i dig its prepunk postjazz attitude. i love the rhythm of it. a film with it’s own wandering metre and spazzed out tempo. it was godard before he disappeared up his own film essay arse for a while. and for that reason it was adored and despised in equal measure by my personal hell-hub of university hipsters.
it’s noir, pastiche (or homage depending on yr bent), hollywood, la nouvelle vague, reportage, montage; a no budget mess of film-makery nods, gleeful anarchy and playful iconoclasm.
it cocked its snook, thumbed its nose, raised it’s middle digit to convention.
the plot for what it’s worth is pretty much a standard crime staple – hoodlum kills cop, goes on the lam with a dame. that’s about it. but it’s not the story that sells it, it’s the methods of telling the tale, an attempt to break the tyranny of plot. for a movie filmed on handheld camera with no cash it still looks beautiful. the aesthetics, lo-fi, natural, improvised. it’s brash and audacious visually and even though it’s been pilfered by everybody from scorsese to altman to gondry to tarantino to wong kar-wai to soderbergh, it still seems fresh as a goddam daisy. it has a fizz and energy that so many of these young jumpcutting punks just don’t get on screen.
so it screams ‘look this is a film’ on occasion. the constant referencing of bogart, the talking to the camera/audience/mirror, the actors as actors, the film as film. that’s the point. it’s a rejection. it’s taking the rules and fucking with them. it’s abusing the best parts of tradition, pointing out the gaps and then filling them with something new and radical and vibrant.
all you need for a movie is a girl and a gun. yup.
right. the magnificent ambersons next. or transformers: revenge of the fallen. i’ve not decided.
