Breathless

What is it with the French and acts of senseless murder? My experience with French media is somewhat limited, but within the first few minutes of Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, I found the film's anti-hero Michel reminding me of Camus's protagonists Patrice Mersault and Meursault from his novels A Happy Death and The Stranger, respectively.

Michele is a small time crook who gets wrapped up in a much larger crime when he kills a policeman after speeding through the French countryside in a stolen car, both acts committed seemingly out of spite. In this early sequence, Michele establishes himself as a cold, somewhat misogynistic petty criminal with an inflated sense of ego and self worth. "Get stuffed," he addresses the camera (and viewer) as he offers his remedy for a distaste of the French countryside.

It isn't until Michele reaches Paris that we see what could pass for a motive for Michele's behavior. As he wonders the city, he comes across a poster of Humphrey Bogart outside a theater. He imitates one of Bogart's trademark gestures as he gazes on the image. For the remainder of the film, he tries to seduce his American friend Patrica while stealing cars and securing money for an escape to Italy, all the while doing his best cynical Bogart-quasi-tough-guy.

Michele, for as tough as he is (or wants you to believe), almost doesn't feel genuine. He is a character who took an idolization much too far, trying to turn his existence into a real life Big Sleep or Casablanca. Patrica is the only one to see through this, telling Michele that Bogart is an image and that Michele should be himself. Michele, of course, never changes. He is Bogart. Even when Michele tells Patrica that he needs her, that he is in love with her and can't live without her, there's this sense that he feels that way because he's wrapped up in a romantic dream where he steals cars, kills a cop, gets the girl and escapes.

"What would Humphrey do?"

Michele refuses to escape when Patrica betrays him, cynically choosing instead to go to jail. When the cops finally catch up to him, he is shot in the back and, in a winking, extended death sequence, he runs several blocks, utters his enigmatic last words, and dies.

Bogie would be proud, right?