The walls of the narrow corridor that leads to the loo at the Curzon Soho are papered with posters that have become not only familiar over the years but, insofar as filmgoing and urinating are two strictly connected biological needs, somehow part of the experience of watching a film there. Among those, the one of Les yeux sans visage has always made me linger and engage in fleeting contemplations. I just couldn’t avoid being hypnotised by that woeful gaze buried behind the mysterious white mask. Having finally watched the film, I now understand why it has earned its place as a classic, and such a coveted spot in a public bathroom. Franju’s famed horror serves as a brilliant case study of narrative exposition, both in terms of explicit versus implicit storytelling and timing. The opening is deliberately ambiguous. Hints of an eerie plot are hardly flashed, leaving us blind in the thrilling obscurity. Yet, only shortly thereafter, the conundrum is surprisingly unravelled, shifting the focus from the what to the how, and somehow elevating the genre from mystery to drama. The film cleverly paces its unfolding by using a measured approach to the most unsettling material. In the first part, any graphic depictions are ingeniously spared, allowing our imagination to conjure the most frightening images. Yet, just when we think we’re not in for a certain cinematic type of gruesome spectacle, we are plunged into a painstakingly long sequence of surgical horror that exposes us to everything we had hoped not to see. The misery of the unwilling protagonist is transfigured into the flesh of the unaware victim, imbuing both fates with a physical weight that persists as a dire shadow throughout the film, only to be revived in the horrific climax and ultimately resolved into a different, more poetic form of freedom.

On a Saturday afternoon, oddly enough, watching a film is by far the strangest thing that can happen to me—dreaming of it, the most exotic and naughty fantasy. But in the apocalyptic post-holiday lethargy everybody around me seems to be in, in a weekend of January where outside is cold but not quite, and it rains but isn’t really, nor is sunny indeed, À bout de souffle comes to comfort me once again.
Idiot… Lâche… These two words are repeatedly heard throughout the film, almost as a warning, a memento mori. Don’t be an idiot… You are a coward… The fear of time slipping away don’t just translate in the philosophical imperative, literally shouted, don’t hide, live, at any cost, but in the terrifying awareness that days are actually going by and being lost already. Michel’s first line in the film famously goes, ‘Après tout, je suis con. Après tout, si. Il faut. Il faut!’ I must. Later on, at a cinema, he is arrested by a lobby card of Humphrey Bogart, Bogie, for The Harder They Fall. There is a lot more in his stare than admiration, a lot more in that iconic gesture of stroking his lips with his thumb than the desire to emulate a hero. There is ambition, urgency, desperation. It never occurred to me how much of that is in À bout de souffle—how much greed and rage. As Truffaut recalled in a note I have recently come across, while Godard was making it, he ‘didn’t have enough money in his pocket to buy a metro ticket, he was as destitute as the character he was filming,’¹ and he was one of the last of the Chahiers du cinéma critics to direct a feature. A few years older than Orson Wells at the time of Citizen Kane, who had since become the parameter by which all young directors measure their own success, he felt the pressure to make something soon and remarkable. The weight of that burden is palpable. The autobiographical connection makes À bout de souffle even deeper and darker. Furthermore, it is Godard himself as a passerby to report his fictional counterpart to the police. Whether any meaning was intended or was it just a nod at Hitchcock’s facetious habit of cameoing in his own films, I am not sure. Yet this does resonate with me profoundly. Yes, I am an idiot, and a coward—and the very one who’s staking my own freedom.
The long scene in the hotel room is more of a marvel every time I see it. There’s a moment in Miloš Forman’s Amadeus where Mozart pitches the idea for an opera that the Emperor wants to be dropped. After describing a scene he is particularly excited about, he says, ‘Guess, Majesty. Imagine the longest time such a thing could last, then double it.’ I always loved that line. À bout the souffle has the same spirit, which is not just arrogance, boldness, insolence. It is true cinematic bravura. All the more so, because it doesn’t come entirely from the page, but from a certain degree of improvisation, from the chemistry between two brilliant actors, from a clever work of montage. And naturally, from the breathtaking exhilaration of capturing what is not repeatable—the moment.

1. ‘It Really Makes You Sick!’ Jean-Luc Godard’s À bout de souffle, Michel Marie (New York Routledge, 2000).