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BREATHLESS Screens at The Tivoli This Tuesday Night – We Are Movie Geeks

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BREATHLESS Screens at The Tivoli This Tuesday Night

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BREATHLESS is not playing at this year’s Classic French Film Festival, but St. Louis classic French film fans get to see it on the big screen anyway! It’s part of the Mildred Lane Kemper Museum’s series A Critical Eye: Avant-Garde Cinema of the 1960s and is screening this Tuesday night (March 24th) at the Tivoli (6350 Delmar Blvd. University City, MO). The show starts at 7pm. Admission is FREE!

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BREATHLESS was remade in 1983 with Richard Gere and Valerie Kaprisky (remember her? Me neither). The remake, directed by Jim McBride, is excellent but has been hard to see in recent years. It will be available on Blu-ray on April 7th, which means this is a perfect time to take in the original to compare and contrast.

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The part that Jean Luc-Godard played in The French New Wave was tremendous. BREATHLESS (1960), with its innovative jump-cuts, catapulted Godard into international fame. His film, as well as collaborator Francois Truffaut’s THE 400 BLOWS, put the New Wave on the map for good. BREATHLESS is a mysteriously beautiful film. Jean-Paul Belmondo plays Michel Poiccard, alias Laszlo Kovacs, a French criminal running from the police. He meets with his lover Patricia Franchini, played by a ridiculously sexy Jean Seberg, in Paris where she works for a newspaper. The film focuses on the dynamics of their relationship, or rather, their lack of a relationship. One of the most famous lines in the film explains it best: “When we talked, I talked about me, you talked about you, when we should have talked about each other.” Considering that this is Michel saying this to Patricia adds so much more to the revelation. Michel is a small, somewhat odd-looking fellow who despises fear and loves sex and movies. In one scene, Michel stands in front of a poster of Humphrey Bogart, from THE HARDER THEY FALL. This is just one example of the methods Godard uses of foreshadowing Michel’s fate. Patricia is an intellectual, interested in art, music, and literature. She is the more mature one of the two, contemplating the deeper meanings of life and love, while Michel is only concerned about sex and money. Belmondo and Seberg have an interesting chemistry together, very much like Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway in BONNIE AND CLYDE (1967). The dialog is brilliantly witty and Martial Solal’s moody, jazzy theme is memorable as well. Godard’s editing style, which is still broken down and studied in film schools today, brought a new technique to the screen. Overall, BREATHLESS is an enjoyable romantic crime drama, with the style of a film noir, and a twist at the end that leaves its audience, well, ….breathless! Belmondo and Godard are still around but poor Ms Seberg killed herself in 1979 (find the amazing 1995 quasi-doc FROM THE JOURNALS OF JEAN SEBERG for the final word on that!)

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Now lucky St. Louisans will have the chance to see the original BREATHLESS when it plays this Tuesday night (March 24th) at the Tivoli (6350 Delmar Blvd. University City, MO) at 7pm

Jean Seberg in Jean-Luc Godard's BREATHLESS (1960). Courtesy Ria