Breathless (1983)

Like Quentin Tarantino, I liked this movie a lot. But for the first time since my heart broke a year ago, I fell in love again :). Richard Gere and Valérie Kaprisky are a lovely couple. The movie was a rollercoaster ride that gave me a lasting happy feeling.

Fmovies: ...you knew when it was announced that the cine-snobs would love to hate BREATHLESS. No, it wouldn't be Godard's A BOUT DE SOUFFLE, and it wouldn't have all the revolutionary touches of the 1960 original. While the director had made a cult favourite a dozen years before (the post-nuclear tale GLEN AND RANDA), and would go on to make THE BIG EASY and GREAT BALLS OF FIRE!, Jim McBride wasn't even a tenth as well known as Godard. But it did have Richard Gere, at the peak of his popularity, as the male star, and he gave perhaps the most entertaining performance of his career to date... ...the story is basically that of the Godard picture, but instead of a French guy pursuing an American gal in Paris, here we have an American guy pursuing a French gal in California. Jesse Lujack, a charming but larcenous hustler, steals a car from a casino parking lot in Vegas and high-tails it to L.A. to hook up with Monica, a French exchange student he'd spent the previous weekend with. But on the way, he unintentionally kills a highway patrolman. Will Jesse make it out of Los Angeles with Monica before the law can catch up with him?... ...for the exchange student, we have Valerie Kaprisky in her English-language debut. She was supposedly hand-picked for the role by Gere himself, and while she puts in a good performance, one still gets the feeling Gere and McBride may have brought the wrong Valerie to the set; the last time I watched the picture, I kept wondering how Valerie Quennessen (FRENCH POSTCARDS, SUMMER LOVERS) would have done in this part. Perhaps it is significant that Kaprisky, while having a successful film and television career in France and Italy, did not perform in another English-language movie until GLAM in 2001, eighteen years later...

I love the character Gere portrayed so flawlessly - Jesse's sheer intensity is a joy to behold. I really enjoyed the music throughout the film also, and the way it captures the varying moods so well. Kaprisky does a good job with her character as well - the exotic Frenchwoman Monica, torn between her plans for her life and her moth-to-the-flame attraction to the exuberant, unstoppable Jesse. This film has just had a run on EPIX on demand and I must have seen it six or seven times - it's one of my all-time favorites: those few, special films that, although I can almost speak the dialogue in unison with the characters, are still the ones I reach for and watch again and again.

Breathless fmovies. This is a good film which has been unfairly panned. The direction is excellent. Valerie Kapriskie does very well as Grere's love interest, and Grere himself, always willing to take an artistic risk, is superbly offbeat. The music is compelling and is used with genius, particulalry in the Santa Ana winds heat scene, where Kapriskie burns up the screen by simply slipping into a shoe. The chemistry between Kapriskie and Grere works. This should be a cult film.

I have never seen a film with so many terrific songs used to such great effect. American critics stupidly trashed this movie when it first came out, saying it desecrated the memory of the French original. Several French critics disagreed and named this remake one of the top ten films of the year.

10/10

To me Richard Gere carried the movie--he managed to make Jesse LuJak a character both repulsive and likeable. LuJak is a petty criminal, car-thief and then a murderer, not very bright (he reads comic books and seems to model himself on The Silver Surfer). LuJak moves in a world of cheap motels and seedy bars, and has a torrid and obviously doomed affair with an art student. But in the end he comes off as somehow admirable--we believe that he loves the Kapinsky character, that he might even be a good father to her child, given the chance. LuJak comes mighty near what I would call a tragic hero--flaws and all.

As for the look of the movie, I find that equally well done--just for example, at one point the hero and heroine make love in torrid red lights, with a black-and white 30s movie in the background, also dealing with doomed lovers. The juxtaposed images were very nicely handled.

Both thumbs up!