Movie Details
| Title: | Breathless | |
| Director: | Jim McBride | |
| Year: | 1983 | |
| Genre: | Drama | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 12.31.25 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (1)
- The Big Easy
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 12.31.25 | Internet | The early 80s Hollywood remake of the seminal Godard film, this one starring Richard Gere at his height and french model/actress Valerie Kaprisky. I put this on late and couldn't finish it until the next day. Perhaps for that reason, perhaps for other reasons, I really didn't like the first half of this movie but the second half kind of grew on me. I think I can't go any further before talking about Richard Gere. I've never enjoyed Richard Gere on screen. I'm sure he's a nice guy in real life and not trying to convince anyone who likes him that he sucks, but I hate him in movies. I hate looking at him, I hate listening to him, I hate his face, I hate his nose, I hate his earlobes. So a movie starring him already has two strikes against it in my book. This movie feels like an erotic drama built around him. He's bare-chested through most of the film, gets naked multiple times (yes, you do see his dick), wears loud retro outfits that fit him exceedingly well ("what are you trying to do, disguise yourself as an asshole?"), there are many many shots of him doing his thing. Even though his character is all over the place and unsympathetic in many ways, I think we're supposed to like him and I think the filmmakers rely on Gere's charisma to accomplish that. Since I'm impervious to his charms, much of this movie was lost on me. Now, to be fair, I think the female lead was cast because she's hot and young and French and she takes her top off multiple times and you see her full-frontal for a moment and she's in sun dresses and swimsuits that show off her figure for the whole movie and I think the filmmakers also rely on her sex appeal making up for her wooden English-as-second-language performance. This worked on me more than Gere but I still saw what was going on. For someone who likes but doesn't love the original, how this even wound up on my hard drive was due to glowing praise in Tarantino's book. Now that I've seen it, this makes sense. The movie's very stylish, there are old cars and Gere's retro costumes match a very Tarantino-esque swagger. Link Wray's on the soundtrack, Gere reads Silver Surfer comics, style and "cool" are heavily prioritized here in a way that most other 1983 movies were probably not doing. I think this is the first time I've recognized Tarantino source material without being told about it first like Taking of Pelham One Two Three or City on Fire or They Call Her One Eye or whatever. I also understand that Gere largely represented the rise of eroticism in 80s cinema. American Gigolo's also on the HD which I'll get to sooner or later, and movies like Body Heat, Body Double, Fatal Attraction, even Basic Instinct all the way up to Adrian Lyne's Unfaithful with Gere and Diane Lane (which is a remake of a Chabrol movie, thanks imdb trivia) I think are all in some way attributable to Gere's dick in American Gigolo. So I get this movie's purpose and respect it. As a child of the 80s , sex appeal was a critical component to movies back then that we have lost (i think due to porn being literally everywhere on The Internet). It's just, for me, even if it weren't Richard Gere, I wouldn't like this movie. Godard's movie works because he uses a kind of standard noir premise and breaks the medium telling it in as new a way as he could. This movie literally has Gere singing the Jerry Lee Lewis song "Breathless" and telling the girl "I'm breathless." The end of the movie is him singing it in close-up then cutting to credits as an X cover of the song plays. Ugh. The times where Gere has to be tough it comes off like he's playing in a school yard, the times where he's being romantic come off skeevy and pushy to me. Kaprisky is very beautiful but that's about it (I will say this. Gere's acting is much better than hers). Also, Bruce Villanch has a small part where he's robbed while taking a shit. That was fun, and James Wong has a small role which is fun. And the cops are kind of hilarious. I spent the whole movie hating on Gere's costumes but the cop's pants at the end are just as obnoxiously loud as anything Gere wears. And lastly, I just want to pontificate a bit about how old I am and how crappy the last 25 years have been. This movie came out 20 years after the original. So in 20 years, movies went from the French New Wave to silly spy spoofs and psychedelic hippie movies to Bonnie & Clyde to gritty 70s stuff - The Godfather, The French Connection - to the birth of blockbusters with Jaws and Star Wars and this movie is on the precipice of slashers and action franchises. Twenty years ago today, we had... 40 Year Old Virgin? A History of Violence? Munich? Walk the Line? Is it me or could these movies come out today? What the fuck? The cars Gere boosts in this movie are like 20 years old and they look like alien constructions next to the boxy shit of 1983. A 2005 car looks exactly the same as a 2025 car except for the headlights and the computer screen in the dash. Now, I guess you could argue youtube wasn't as big back then and the iPhone would change the entertainment medium toward Vine and Tiktok and Instagram. Netflix streaming, 4k, the brief window of 3DTVs... and when I think of 2010s movies or 2020s movies I think of Marvel, CGI-fest tentpole glop so maybe it's not so much as nothing's changed but more that it's changed for the worse. I think the identity of 2020s cinema might be that of a death throe? I don't want to be doom and gloom but it's hard to watch a movie like this and think of a modern comparator. But also I graduated college in 2000 and time's been on fast forward since then. I couldn't tell you the difference between 2010 and 2015 but I'm sure someone who was in high school then could. Anyway, I guess the length of this note suggests that even though I didn't like the movie it did make me feel things, so you win this time, Richard. |
