Get Behind Me, Jean Seberg

260) Bonjour Tristesse (1958) Dir: Otto Preminger Date Released: April XX, 1958 Date Seen: August 18, 2012 Rating: 3.5/5

261) Breathless (1960) Dir: Jean-Luc Godard Date Released: February 7, 1961 Date Seen: August 18, 2012 Rating: 4.25/5

This was a great double feature, one of the handful of reasons I'm very glad I got to go to DC two weekends past. I'm not nuts about Bonjour Tristesse, mostly because of Jean Seberg's voiceover (ARGH, NO, SHUT UP). But I do love the sea-side resort atmosphere of that film (reminds me of Xios, the Greek island where my mother is from), and I also rather enjoy, as Victor Morton put it during our brief post-screening discussion, the film's Sirk-ian melodrama. But yeah, eesh, that voiceover! 

Seberg is much more impressive in Breathless, a film that I'm very glad I got to see sans the academic expectations that cinema studies classes would require. Now I can quietly groove on the superficial but expansive pleasures of, say, the interview junket scene where Seberg musters up the courage to talk to Jean-Pierre Melville's sagacious authorial wind-bag.

Then again, my lack of knowledge is clearly a double-edged sword. I don't have as much of the historical context I'd like to fully process either film, y'know? So while I luxuriated in both of their anything-goes narratives, I was only totally immersed in the latter film during its final half hour, when the dragnet really starts to tighten around poor Jean-Paul Belmondo. That (probably) famous shot of Seberg explaining why she chose to rat on her lover is especially incredible, as is Belmondo's long scramble down the rue as he dies. I got similar feelings of visceral joy watching Seberg chase after her stepmother in Tristesse, trying in vain to prevent her from discovering the infidelity she helped to facilitate.

What I'm trying to say is: that was nice. Really hit the spot.

166) Breathless (2009)

166) Breathless (2009) Dir: Yang Ik-Joon Not Yet Released Date Seen: June 6th, 2009 Rating: 2.75/5

Writer/director Yang Ik-Joon's Breathless isn't necessarily a bad film, just one with questionable emotional worth. His character study of Sang-hoon (played by Yang himself), an abusive debt collector that defines the South Korean male patriarchial tyrant stereotype--he beats his women, he's a deadbeat dad, he curses constantly, he drinks too much and he's also a product of a broken home--is honest in its rawness but infused with a dishonest kind of wishful thinking. 

Over the course of the film, Sang-hoon changes for the better and while he does it on his own terms, the changes that he undergoes after he takes a surly teen under his wing feel like cheap in their  quick melodramatic fixes to serious character flaws. Yang's performance and his interactions with his sister and her kid alone humanize him sufficiently, making this added queasily romantic subplot also a fruitless redundancy. As the relationship gradually becomes the film's central focus, Breathless loses its edge as a prickly entry in what NYAFF programmer Daniel Craft sagaciously calls the Korean subgenre of "My Bastard Dad" melodramas.

Note: Yang's performance is powerful but like Tom Hardy's performance in Bronson, which also relies on broad physicality, I hesitate to praise him in a role that requires him to go over the top and never come down.