Une Nouvelle Femme Fatale: BREATHLESS

Knowing, as we do, that Jean-luc Godard's first feature length film, A Bout de Souffle (BREATHLESS, 1960) was a revolutionary work of the French New Wave film movement does little to calm the worries of some of today's viewers who are at pains to understand the motivation of Patricia (Jean Seberg). It is Patricia who "snitches" on her lover, Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and subsequently hastens his death at the hands of the police. What seems like a bizarre turn of events is really a simple inversion of a film noir/gangster film convention. Where usually a street-wise and "hard-boiled" male character would escape from a clever femme fatale or turn her in to the police Godard has simply inverted this convention in a film that has a conventional story told in an unconventional cinematic context. One should remember John Huston's THE MALTESE FALCON with its unforgettable parting lines from Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) to Bridget O'Shaunassy (Mary Astor), which goes something like," If they give you twenty years, I'll be waiting for you. If they hang you by that sweet little neck of yours, I'll always remember you." Here in this traditional film noir, Sam Spade turns in the femme fatale. Moreover, in many other gangster films and film noirs that preceded BREATHLESS, the man is most often 'done in' by the femme fatale as in Billy Wilder's DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944) and SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950). So it should be no surprise that Patricia's duplicitous nature in BREATHLESS is really only a continuation of the femme fatale genre convention- albeit without the intricate plot entanglements that so often trapped the doomed couple in the previous films. In fact what we witness in BREATHLESS when Patricia 'snitches' to the police on Michel is her own escape from doom, her difficult, but clever avoidance of a shared tragic entanglement with Michel. For he is a man whom she knows will not live long; he is a man whom she knows will destroy her with his 'love' for her. In many ways, BREATHLESS itself is an inversion of a later Godard film, PRENOM:CARMEN where the femme fatale explains to her lover that," if I love you, then that's the end of you." This is entirely the predicament of Patricia who knows that if she accepts Michel love (by way of his offer to run away to Italy) then she will end her own independence as a woman: his love would be then end of her. The femme fatale in BREATHLESS is a new kind of woman independent and avoiding the traps of previous doomed film noir and gangster film couples. We can surmise that Godard was aware of this new femme fatale he was creating when he has Patricia do the same gesture of Bogart as Michel lay dead in the street as if to suggest that she is the one who has come out on top- she has avoided a fate that she would have shared had she accepted Michel's love.