Breathless 1960 and Pierrot Le Fou 1966/68 – David Lohrey
September 7, 2026
Breathless in B & W vs Pierrot in Color
Belmondo in both.
Jean Seberg vs Anna Karina
In Breathless he is the killer; in Pierrot she is the killer.
In Breathless she kills him (by calling the police who shoot him) while in Pierrot he shoots her.
I thought Breathless was gripping; I thought Pierrot was boring, but beautiful, far more beautiful than any Hollywood movie I can think of, ever.
In Breathless, Belmondo seems young, while only six years later he seems an old man.
In both the man is begging for sex and rarely if ever seems to get it. So much of the story is about the man being strung along, panting alongside a moody, sexy woman who is always in control. In Breathless he gets killed as he waits for her to decide whether she loves him. In Pierrot, she gets killed, and it is largely because she refuses to be loved or to love. The male character is doing nothing and going nowhere.
There is no sex in either film, no nudity. The men sleep in their underwear. The women have boys’ bodies and never appear undressed. Contempt, the other famous Godard film, opens with a loving stroking of Bardot’s rear end by the camera.
There is lots of smoking and, in Breathless, Belmondo has a strange lip stroking habit which I think is called self-stimming in psychiatric circles. Most of their dialogue consists of him begging for sex and her refusing. This is the heart of Contempt as well. She won’t put out and he is put off.
There are two or more murders …he kills a policeman for no reason in Breathless, she kills a threatening heavy because she is afraid. He shoots the cop and shrugs. She however drives a pair of scissors into the back the man’s neck. Neither appears the least bit shaken or even involved in the events.
Both films use American cars, convertibles obsessively and ignore the more beautiful Citroëns that fill the screen in traffic. Thunderbirds are always available for the taking; there seems to be one on every corner when Belmondo wants to drive.
Belmondo is earthy and looks a bit like Robert Kennedy, same coloring for sure. He always has a cigarette in his mouth. He seems stupid. Both Seberg and Karina are smart, far smarter than he, boyish, full of thoughts unknown, while Belmondo seems empty. Seberg comes off very well, seeming to be very special. Karina seems more ordinary, looks ordinarily pretty, slim, flat-chested like Seberg. Bardot is by far the more interesting actress, as seen in Contempt. (Curious how vulnerable and sick the Americans Seberg and Monroe are in comparison to the tough French gals who come through their careers unscathed.) Seberg is a close second but is cold and calculating like Sylvia Plath. He is no match for her. In this regard he reminds me of Brando in Last Tango in Paris, where he, the innocent romantic, is murdered by the ambitious bourgeois firecracker who lets herself be man-handled but is always calculating: “He is a good fuck, but marry him? Don’t make me laugh.”
The universe of this period is known to English speakers through plays like SAVED and films like A CLOCKWORK ORANGE. In Saved by Edward Bond the hoodlums gathering in a public park throw lit matches into a baby pram just for the fun of it. In the Kubrick, you have the wild “Singing in the Rain” kicking incident (thus crippling the old man for life) and his stylish wife who is raped to death. In the second break-in, Kubrick’s antihero smashes the skull of a woman with her ornamental sculpture of a penis. This is Godard’s moral universe, France and England, late 60s: murder with a shrug, once shocking, now, a big yawning nothing.
Conclusion: based on these films I would say the director is endlessly inventive with the camera but his subject remains the same. There is little human development. His men are 15, his women 33. The men are horny boys, totally adrift, the women are hot to trot but want more but do not know what exactly it is they are looking for. Murderers are fine by them, murdering is even more fun, but beyond that they don’t especially want to be told what to do. The male is happy to do what he is told as long as he is rewarded like a dog.