I think you make a good point. It’s certainly a movie of it’s time, perhaps it has an added allure for those that lived through those times.

Also, I forgot to clarify in my original post; Breathless was my ‘favourite’ film for a long while … not my ‘greatest’ film. Does it compare to The Godfather, Raging Bull, Battleship Potemkin or Casablanca ? … of course not. But for me, it was one I would pull out a re-watch many times.

What was it they said about Brando ? “Women wanted to be with him, men wanted to *be* him. I think I had a bit of a man crush on the Richard Gere of that era If you wanted to be a guy that chicks dug big time, he was who you’d want to be like. (Refer Exhibit B “American Gigolo “)

I first saw this during it’s initial release to video back in 1984-ish, I would have been in my early twenties. Watched it at home one night (on VHS!). Blew me away. Yes it’s an over the top, larger than life performance by Richard, but when you see Dennis Quaid’s performance in both Great Balls of Fire (there’s the Jerry Lee Lewis thing *again*) and also with The Big Easy (both directed by McBride) you can see for sure that Gere’s performance in Breathless was exactly the performance that Jim wanted from Richard. No doubt about that.

The movie has an impending sense of fatalistic doom, even from the brightly lit and bouncy opening scene of Jesse leaving Las Vegas. You get a sense from the get-go this is not going to end well. I think the screenplay is brilliant. It takes a lot of balls to do an American remake of a film that most ‘serious’ cinemaphiles regard as the French New Wave equivalent to the Shroud of Turin.

Yet McBride and co-writer Kit Carson pull it off in bravura style. Carson went on to later write the screenplay of Paris Texas and for some reason looking at a lot of the scenes from Breathless, especially the quieter ones that seems to make a weird kind of sense. The quieter scenes and particularly those featuring the music pieces by Phillip Glass and Brian Eno are eerily reminiscent of some parts of Paris Texas with it’s Ry Cooder score.

I think that whether you like Breathless or not, hinges on whether you buy the two main leads and for me they are perfectly flawed. By that I mean yes, Kaprisky’s performance is not Meryl Streep, but it’s not supposed to be. She’s a french chick transplanted into Los Angeles. She seems to have very few friends, she just studies hard and wants to get her degree. She gets away to Vegas for a weekend to blow off steam and whilst there has a fling with Jesse (unfilmed), who then becomes infatuated with her and follows her back to Los Angeles. The movie picks up from there.

I’m no doubt going to ruffle some more movie purists feathers when I say Valerie’s performance in Breathless is as awkwardly appropriate as Sofia Coppola’s in Godfather III. Neither of them look ‘comfortable’ and I think that is the way it was intended.

Regardless of whether you feel the movie works, one must surely agree the chemistry between Gere and Kaprisky is smoking hot. Not just the sex scenes, but throughout the movie she pulls off the ‘Im-very-attracted-to-this-guy-but-I-know-he’s-bad-news’ vibe very well. Meanwhile Jesse is sexy, charismatic and street smart, but dumb as a box full of hammers. He’s a teenager in a man’s body … a handsome west-coast, street punk version of Peter Pan.

I think it is surely Richard Gere’s bravest performance. I can’t imagine too many actors around who would have the balls to go as far out on the edge as he does in this movie. You can’t go half-way in a role like this, you have to go all the way to the edge and he does that. He must have trusted Jim quite a bit and for that I congratulate him because I think they both pull it off.

The curating of the music tracks is way cool. I’ve mentioned Glass and Eno, but Message of of Love and the Dexys Midnight Runners tracks are wonderfully used in the foot chase sequence. Link Wray and Mink Deville are used to great effect … as is Suspicious Minds in the make up sex-shower scene. To wrap it up in glorious 80s style LA punk icons X let rip on ball tearing cover version of Breathless over the end credits. (This is the same X that were featured in the Tom Berenger/Charlie Sheen baseball comedy Major League with their version of Wild Thing)

Quentin Tarantino is on record as saying Breathless is one of his all time favourite movies. He would incidentally later re-cycle the Link Wray track “Rumble” into Pulp Fiction. I saw an interview with him where he said that when writing he often starts with an idea for a scene and then he will first come up with the music track(s) to play over that scene before he has even written a word of dialogue. I have wondered if Breathless was one of those movies that inspired this approach in him ?

OK, I’m gonna wrap up on this coz, I could write a novel (what, you haven’t already they say ?) A few last things.

The highly watchable Lisa Jane Persky makes her first McBride cameo as the backstabbing gum chewing sales girl at Tomachov’s workplace, McBride would have her play almost the same sassy character in The Big Easy a few years later, this time as a cop.

John P Ryan steals every scene he is in as the hard boiled Lt Parmental. A little script in-gag occurs in the above scene when the Lt and his Sgt question Tomachov the Lt says something like “Hey Tomachov are you going to drop a dime on Lujack like you did last year for us on your buddy Johnny Goddard ? ” (Of course in French John is ‘Jean’, John Goddard = Jean (Luc) Goddard.

I also love the line when the cops, closing in on Jesse, crash the ground breaking ceremony with Doctor Boudreaux. When Monica’s teacher Paul intercedes wondering what is going on Lt Parmental rounds on him and says venomously “Hey …. listen pal, don’t F. U. C. K. with the LAPD” (Spelling out the capitals) go on do it .. you know you want to) Nice piece of script.

As a final comment I was further blown away when I picked up the DVD version of this only about ten years ago to replace my tired old ex rental VHS (stop laughing) From the opening scene onwards, I was stunned at the quality of the cinematography. Further research reveals it was shot by Richard Kline near the end of his long career. Kline started in early sixties and shot The Boston Strangler, the Andromeda Strain, Soylent Green, King Kong (1976) The Mechanic, Mr Majestyk, Death Wish amongst others.

But perhaps most tellingly, from a stylistic point of view, Kline shot the luscious, sexy brilliant Body Heat for Lawrance Kasdan. Thinking about Body Heat and Breathless together and replaying scenes in your mind you can definitely see a commonality between to the look and feel of those two movies. Body Heat is a great flick which if you adjust your set to black and white would hold it’s own with any film noir from the 40s. That movie of course featured a pyromaniac character called Teddy played by a young chap called Mickey Rourke in his break out role, but that’s a story for another day …..