Summary
We see Michel walking down the steps of the subway and the two cops run down a different set of stairs. Seconds later, Michel emerges from a different entrance to the subway and examines a poster for a film with Humphrey Bogart. He stares at the image of Humphrey Bogart, removes his sunglasses, and strokes his lips admiringly.
In a blacked-out shot, we hear Michel and Patricia talking, and he tells her he saw a man die. We see them standing next to each other, and she wants to go to a restaurant, but he has no money. He lies and tells her he must make a call first. He goes into a bathroom at a restaurant, assaults a man, and takes his money. When he returns, Patricia is walking away. He asks her to sleep with him that night and tells her about a newspaper article he read about a man who stole five million francs to seduce a girl. Then the man came clean about being a criminal and the woman stuck with him, acting as his sidekick in crime.
Suddenly Patricia remembers she has a meeting with a journalist, and Michel offers to drive her. On the way, Michel asks Patricia to stay with her, which she declines. She asks him why he's so sad, and he tells her, "I can't do without you." He then tells Patricia that she cannot go and meet with the journalist and lists every body part of hers that he finds pretty, but that she is a coward. He drops her off and she kisses him on the cheek, and as she walks away, Michel yells, "I never want to see you again!"
We see Patricia going up an escalator to a restaurant to meet with the editor. "I hope nothing happens to you like the woman in the book," he says as she takes her seat, and he reveals that Patricia's book is about a woman who gets an abortion that kills her. "It'd be a shame if that happened to you," he says, to which she responds, "We'll see."
He asks her what's wrong and she tells him that she'd like to hide in a hole. He tells her that elephants vanish when they are sad, and she tells him, "I don't know if I'm unhappy because I'm not free, or if I'm not free because I'm unhappy." He tells her a story about telling a friend he wanted to sleep with her and her returning the feeling; it is unclear if he is talking about himself and Patricia. He then tells her to come to the office tomorrow to interview a novelist. They get up and leave the restaurant together, and as they walk towards the door, Michel emerges from a corner and watches them leave. He smokes and walks through the restaurant and out the door, watching Patricia and the editor walk with their arms around each other.
As he buys a newspaper, Michel turns around to see Patricia kissing the editor in his car. The streetlights come on as they drive away. We see Michel drive away.
The next day, we see the Eiffel Tower as if from a car. Then, we see Patricia wandering down the road and looking at her reflection in a mirror in a storefront, before going into her apartment building. She asks the doorman where her key is and he tells her it must be in her door. When she opens her door, Michel is in her bed and he awakens with a start. "I took the key downstairs," he tells her and she complains, "I can never be alone when I want to be."
Michel looks at himself in the mirror and says to himself, "I always fall for girls who aren't cut out for me." He then follows Patricia to the bed, where she is sulking. "I'm trying to think of something, but I can't seem to," she says, and Michel tells her he's going back to sleep. When Michel complains about the fact that Patricia did not see him the previous night, she tells him that it's important for her career to spend time with the editor. Michel replies, "No, what's important is going to Rome with me." He asks her if she slept with the editor, and she tells him she didn't.
Michel keeps putting the sheet over his head as Patricia talks. "Why'd you come here, Michel?" she asks him, and he tells her he wanted to sleep with her again. "That's hardly a reason," she says. "Sure it is, it means I love you," he says, but Patricia isn't sure if she loves him back yet. Michel flips through a magazine with photographs of naked women and bemoans the fact that women are so inconstant. "I want us to be like Romeo and Juliet," Patricia says, as the camera shows a picture of Romeo and Juliet that she has on her wall. "Just like a girl!" he says, frustrated, to which Patricia responds, "Romeo couldn't live without Juliet, but you can."
Michel tells Patricia that he will count to eight and that she has to smile by then or he will strangle her. He counts with his hands around her neck, and Patricia finally smiles. She gets up off the bed and Michel looks under her skirt, and she slaps him. Michel calls her a coward as she lights her cigarette. When he asks for his jacket, she hands it to him and notices a passport. She asks if it's his, and he tells her it's his brother's. They smoke together, and Michel asks her if she ever thinks about death. "Say something nice," she says, but he cannot think of anything. She admires his ashtray, which he tells her is Swiss. Then he tells her his grandfather had a Rolls Royce.
Patricia hangs a poster on the wall, and Michel asks why she slapped him when he looked at her legs. "It wasn't my legs," she replies.
Analysis
Breathless is a film about film as much as anything else. This is first established when Michel and the young woman in her apartment discuss their shared history in the film industry. She tells him she has stopped trying to be an actress (because it requires sleeping around) and has become a script girl, and he tells her that he worked as an assistant on a film when he was broke. Then, after he has left Tolmachev's office, Michel looks reverently at a poster for a Humphrey Bogart film. In this light, we begin to see Michel as a man who wants desperately to turn his own life into a movie, a gangster film—to gradually become Humphrey Bogart.
Godard uses camera angle and perspective to align us with characters at different times. For instance, for many of the scenes, we see Michel from a distance, walking through Paris in a fedora and a suit, the silhouette of a man with a romantic image of himself. Then, when he stops and examines the Humphrey Bogart poster, the camera zooms in on the image of Humphrey Bogart, an iconic Hollywood face, emblematic of film noir and the strong silent American hero, the hardboiled detective with a tortured inner life. After a moment of showing Bogart, the camera turns to Michel, framing his face in close-up. Michel has a much younger, prettier face than Bogart, with full lips and a look of wonder and curiosity that is missing from the stern Hollywood A-lister. In this moment, the viewer sees all of Michel's desires, the way he projects himself onto the romantic hero, wanting to become larger than life.
Camera angle and photography continue to tell a psychological story when Michel and Patricia go for a car ride. We cannot see their faces, but the shot is filmed as if from the backseat. The camera stays on Patricia for much of the ride, as Michel gets more aggressive, forbidding her to go to her meeting, and calling her a coward. As he lists all the parts of her body that he loves, the camera cuts with each comma, creating a fragmented, stitched together effect and heightening the sense that the couple is disconnected in this moment. Even though we cannot see Patricia's face, we can sense her disdain for Michel's disingenuousness and immaturity.
In this section of the film, we learn more about Patricia, played by the intelligent and mysterious American actress Jean Seberg. Patricia must go to a meeting with an editor of some kind, who alludes to her writing practice. Evidently, she has written a story about a woman who gets accidentally pregnant and dies when she tries to have the pregnancy terminated. Unlike Michel, Patricia is not on the outside of the creative industry looking in, but working as a writer and having professional meetings about it. Still, she shares with Michel a tendency to blur the lines between fiction and reality, and when her editor says he hopes that the fate of her heroine does not befall her, Patricia is coy, and says, rather enigmatically, "we'll see."
While the viewer has been more aligned with Michel up until this point, we begin to see Patricia's point of view once Michel takes up residence in her apartment. As we learn in her meeting with the editor, Patricia is in a crisis of meaning in her life, unhappy and searching for something meaningful and lasting. Meanwhile, all Michel can talk about is wanting to sleep with her, and the two of them engage in a face-off of gender, each burrowing further in their respective points of view, in between connective moments. Patricia and Michel's difference is highlighted by her interest in the story of Romeo and Juliet, and the picture of the Shakespearean lovers hanging on her wall. While Patricia wants heightened love and passion, Michel just wants a smile and to play games together, some of which rest on the edge of danger and violence. Where Patricia is delicate and sensitive in a gentle and feeling way, Michel shows his vulnerability by being disrespectful and brutish, but these differences draw the lovers to each other all the more.
