Remembering Jean-Paul Belmondo, an Accidental Revolutionary of the French New Wave

The art of movies started for me with Jean-Luc Godard’s first feature, “Breathless,” from 1960, and therefore with its star, Jean-Paul Belmondo, who died on Monday, at the age of eighty-eight. I first saw the film as a teen-ager, in 1975, but even before then I knew the name and the face of Belmondo and considered him to be the height of cool—his 1964 film “That Man from Rio,” a James Bond spoof for which he did his own hair-raising stunts, had been broadcast a few years earlier, on network TV, on a Saturday night. I was well aware of the notion of Gallic charm, but I had never witnessed Gallic swagger, and I learned in a flash that there were kinds of sophistication—and fun—far beyond my ken that awaited discovery in, and even defined, adulthood.

By Belmondo’s own account, “Breathless” made him famous overnight. He was twenty-six when it was released, and its success took him by surprise. He had trained for a career in the theatre and never expected to remain in movies. But, with “Breathless,” Belmondo—for all his originality in acting and his distinctive personality—found himself thrust to the forefront of an artistic revolution, the French New Wave, a movement and a group with which he would forever be identified, even though he didn’t share its extreme artistic ambitions. In effect, he became an icon of a cinema to which he didn’t belong, and the gap between his place in the history books and his place in the industry was a defining trait of—and an unresolved crisis in—his career.

Godard, who first directed Belmondo in a short film, “Charlotte et son Jules,” in mid-1958, wrote a review later that year likening him to two of the greatest actors of the French cinema, calling him “the Michel Simon and the Jules Berry of tomorrow.” He promised Belmondo the lead in his first feature, but, when, the following year, he got the chance to make “Breathless,” he considered other actors (including the singer Charles Aznavour) before choosing Belmondo. Godard, Belmondo, and the world got lucky. In “Breathless,” Belmondo plays Michel Poiccard, a small-time gangster who patterns his self-image on that of Humphrey Bogart, as Godard had styled his movie on classic American films noirs. What the real-life Belmondo has in common with Bogart is that he was no gangster, roughneck, or outsider: Belmondo’s parents were artists (his father a celebrated sculptor, with many official commissions), and Belmondo was trained at France’s leading theatre conservatory. There he was the head of a pack of lively cutups—and also great actors, including Françoise Fabian and Bruno Cremer—who studied classic theatre by day and, by night, took their rowdy revels to the streets for antic varieties of improvised theatre. But his teachers didn’t take him seriously as a leading man. After receiving modest grades for a juried public performance (which the public acclaimed), he caused a scandal by giving his professors the finger; the low marks blocked the path to his great ambition, to become one of the honored members of France’s venerable national repertory company, the Comédie-Française.

His movie career began mainly with supporting roles in popular comedies, and his prominent role in a New Wave classic from 1959, Claude Chabrol’s “À Double Tour” (“Double-Locked”)—a scintillating exercise in directorial style—offered him little leeway in performance. In “Breathless,” Belmondo got the chance to cut loose. To the role of Michel Poiccard he brought an athleticism that is jumpy yet seductive, antic yet erotic; he is at once self-mocking and self-pitying, filled with inchoate fury and boundless ambition. He gave Godard’s philosophical perorations the street cred of slangy, dashing Parisian style to match the character’s mythic, fallen-angel desperation. I’ve noted before that the film’s life-changing impact on me had to do with Godard’s sense of blending philosophy and jazz, and that combination is inseparable from the contained intensity, the rhythmic energy, the dialectical ease, the breezy antics, and the offhanded insolence that Belmondo brought to the role.

“Breathless,” Godard said, in 1960, is “a documentary about Jean Seberg and about Jean-Paul Belmondo.” Though it wasn’t literally so (the actors played scripted roles), his comment accurately captures the curse that the parts represented for both of its stars: after playing in a style so closely modelled on their own gestures, tones, and personalities, all other roles were something more ordinary—merely acting. Belmondo launched his career with an artistic high point that any performer would have trouble replicating. He became greatly in demand, and, although he had little confidence in his future in the movies, he grabbed the opportunities that came his way and did three, four, five films a year, quickly becoming a staple of the mainstream of French cinema. But his roles sat uneasily upon him. Whether portraying the tough guys with whom he was identified or playing against type (as in the title role of Jean-Pierre Melville’s “Leon Morin, Priest”), his parts—or, rather, the direction that he received in performing them—were like clothing cut too tight and hemming him in. In Philippe de Broca’s “That Man from Rio,” Belmondo’s hearty and energetic bravado is limited by the filmmaker’s modest, cheerful artistry.

After a supporting role—lively but peripheral—in Godard’s 1961 comedy “A Woman Is a Woman,” Belmondo teamed up with the director again, in 1965, for “Pierrot le Fou.” The reunion was volcanic. Godard at the time was in a state of artistic and emotional crisis, and in Belmondo he found the perfect counterpart for both. He cast Belmondo as Ferdinand Griffon, an advertising man and a family man who, when he falls suddenly in love with the family’s babysitter (Anna Karina, then Godard’s ex-wife), goes on the run with her for a journey of aesthetic and romantic self-discovery that gets him into deep political water and leaves him in a state of sublime, exalted, rapturously self-destructive fury. “Pierrot le Fou” was a high-budget film with a spectacular element to match; it was, in effect, Godard’s last Hollywood-inspired film, a symbolic drama of his own reckless dash off the path of commercial production. Whereas in “Breathless” Godard made revelatory use of Belmondo’s anonymity, in “Pierrot” he made similarly illuminating use of his fame, lending particular pathos to the character of a comfortable insider who becomes a daring, wandering, questing dropout and follows his destiny to its radical, transcendent extremes.

Afterward, Godard and Belmondo considered other projects together—an adaptation of Céline’s “Journey to the End of the Night”; “La Bande à Bonnot” (“Bonnot’s Gang”), which was to be the director’s take on the early-twentieth-century anarchist gangsters; a bio-pic about the gangster Jacques Mesrine—but they didn’t come to fruition. The duo never worked together again. Belmondo’s great post-Godard role came in François Truffaut’s “Mississippi Mermaid,” from 1969, playing an exaggerated yet more realistic version of Ferdinand—an unsophisticated and wealthy man who, cheated by a grifting woman (Catherine Deneuve), takes off in pursuit of her and follows the path consciously to the edge of doom. (It got terrible reviews and was a commercial bust.) He admirably served the modern cinema when he agreed both to produce and to star in Alain Resnais’s historical drama “Stavisky,” from 1974, at a time when Resnais was having trouble getting his movies funded. Yet Belmondo’s presence in “Stavisky” proves strangely distracting, and an air of mutual respect suffuses the production; Resnais withholds his usual audacities of style and narrative form, and Belmondo doesn’t let his own performance sparkle too brilliantly. (That film, too, was both a critical and commercial failure.)

Belmondo was forty-one when “Stavisky” was released. He had his own production company, and, as producer and star, he saw to its success. He appeared in twenty-four more features in the course of his career. Through the eighties, many of them—action films, war films, police thrillers—were major hits, but none left a major mark on the history of cinema. In 2001, Belmondo suffered a stroke that left him physically disabled and impaired his speech. He’ll be remembered for bearing the burden of several ingenious, audacious performances that pushed the boundaries of the cinema further than he himself could ultimately go. His self-surpassing art is a cautionary tale of greatness.