This review first appeared in the listings magazine In Dublin, at the time of the film’s original release
Well, I shake all over and you know why
© Unichappell Music Inc., Obie Music, Inc
I’m sure it’s love, honey, that’s no lie
‘Cause when you call my name
You know I burn like wood in flame
You leave me
Ahhhhh, breathless!
Jim McBride’s decision to remake Jean-Luc Godard’s À Bout de Souffle (1960) in an American setting is validated, as it were, by the existence of a recording by Jerry Lee Lewis of an Otis Blackwood song, Breathless. And Richard Gere, bopping frenziedly along with The Killer, turns in a performance to match the song’s energy, twitching and preening his way through this account of a doomed cop-killer, high on his own self-image.
But Jesse Lujack is image without substance. His identity is an assemblage of elements from American popular culture—the Silver Surfer, rock’n’roll. Early in the movie, he speeds along the desert highway in a stolen car, appearing, in an almost monochrome process shot, like a gangster from some forties thriller (perhaps Humphrey Bogart, the idol of Godard’s original hero, in High Sierra).
At crucial moments, he sustains his sense of identity with music. For a moment he is floored by the infidelity of his girlfriend Monica (Valerie Kaprisky) and by the discovery that the police are on to him. But then he breaks into the Elvis Presley hit Suspicious Minds and, reinflated by the song as it swells up on the film’s soundtrack, goes to make love to her in the shower.
McBride repeats the device at the film’s end. Surrounded by armed police, Jesse dances provocatively around the automatic pistol at his feet. Jerry Lee Lewis rises up to support him as he sings and postures… then recedes to leave him terminally stranded in reality.
On the run, Jesse goes to an associate for the money to take him to Mexico. Unable to come up with the cash, his friend gives him his jacket. ‘Style counts’ he points out. And that is exactly what Jesse is: pure style, a confusion of signifiers devoid of any signified. In that sense, he is emblematic of contemporary American mainstream cinema—maybe of America itself. Infinite vitality, utterly without meaning.
‘I’d love to know what’s behind that face of yours’ the fascinated Monica, standing in for the cinema audience, tells him. ‘I stare at you and I stare at you and I can’t see anything.’ It is significant that at the turning point of his life, the transition from small-time car thief into murderer, Jesse suffers a lapse of consciousness in which the gun appears to fire itself.
Like Godard before him, McBride would appear to be attempting some sort of deconstruction of Hollywood genre—a reduction to a scattered collection of disparate motifs. Unfortunately, he never manages to find sufficient distance.
He has, for example, imitated Godard’s editing style, rupturing continuity with jump-cuts and repetitions. He seems not to have considered that, in the twenty-five years since À Bout de Souffle, Godard’s disruptive tactics have become commonplace, an accepted element of mainstream Hollywood cinematic style.
So, at the end, McBride finds himself unable to leave his hero stranded. When the music falls from beneath his feet, Jesse grabs for the gun and whirls to face the cops. Halfway through the action, the frame freezes to leave him caught in amber like Newman and Redford at the end of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. McBride cannot resist confirming Jesse in his self-image. He dies the iconic tragic hero. Hollywood myth-making triumphs again.
Donald Hounam 