france, 1960, frenchPoor guy was minding his own business, hiding from himself, as you do. Then his good-for-nothing brother just had to show up and ruin everything.
FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT
Shoot the Piano Player
I have mentioned before that Breathless was the film that, more than any other, introduced me to this journey through the history of world “cinema”. To be sure, I had seen “art films” before, in particular Ran, but that was the one that just knocked me flat on my back and had me rethinking everything I thought I knew about film.
If I had never seen that, this might have been the one to do it. In many ways it’s very similar, just nowhere near as good or as impactful. Truffaut wrote the story for both, and the ideas he’s playing with here aren’t that fundamentally different. Maybe it really is just that, as Truffaut once said, Breathless is sadder than intended because Godard was just sadder than he is. Maybe I need that sadness a bit, because I can be a bit of a melancholy boy myself.
But also, I read that this film almost undoes its own goals, by how seamlessly it integrates its various genres into one cohesive whole. In a sense that’s very true. It’s so potentially incongruous, but it all just comes together so easily. That should be praise, but maybe that obscures the difficulty of the endeavor to the point that we miss the point.
Overall I still enjoyed this quite a lot. I wouldn’t say this was top-tier Truffaut, but that’s an absurdly high bar to hit anyway. The examination of the ways in which hiding from your problems doesn’t actually solve them remains a fertile territory to mine. I’d like to hope that Charlie gets another chance at happiness. He seems like he could use it.