47. Breathless

A stolen car. A revolver. A man running through a field.

In quick cuts, we get the bare essentials of a story about a fugitive.

Just as much as the movie is talked about and taught as being an example of disruptive editing, there are also long scenes of dialogue with few cuts. Hangout scenes.

It’s a film that takes me back to Introduction to Cinema 236, and having the professor take us back in time to show the origin of so many techniques we take for granted.

It reminds me of watching a rented copy on my laptop a few semesters later with someone I had an ecstatic crush on, but trying to play it ever so cool and close to my chest because I was under the impression this was something I should do. Also (like me) she was the kind of person who was genuinely interested in watching the complete movie without distracting each other.

And it’s something I return to from time to time. Less because the filmmaking itself sparked something in me, but because it’s a talisman from that time. Like touching this object connects me back to that person I was and those feelings I felt.

I think about the moment Jean-Paul Belmondo looks at a picture of Humphrey Bogart and tries to copy him. The way that Bogart was this character’s conduit toward being cool. That there was something he wanted for himself that he thought could come through this indirect interaction with an icon.

That moment of not quite knowing yourself, but finding a model. The act of copying someone else in an attempt to see if you have something similar to what they have inside you as well.

And that feeling, maybe more than most, explains who I was in undergrad. Someone trying on personas. Tamping down the earnest expressions of self to try to be like other people who seemed like they had things figured out, and missing out on the realization that the one thing they actually had figured out was how to be themselves.

Bring it back around, and there I am watching Michel Poiccard end up losing everything because he got caught up in some cool, tough guy fantasy of who he was supposed to be.

Maybe when we work so hard to keep ourselves from getting hurt by others, we make it easier to hurt ourselves.