Not at the end of the soufflé

One of the classics of the French Novelle Vague (translation: New Vague) is the Jean-Luc Godard film Breathless. It's not a movie I care for because the main character is a talky jerk. But all the critic and filmmaker types love it. So in the early 1980s, some of them got the brilliant idea to remake it, also calling the movie Breathless. TCM ran it some months back, so I figured I'd give this remake a chance.

Richard Gere stars as Jesse Lujack, a man-child who, as the movie opens, is in Las Vegas seemingly partying, although that's not really why he's there. He seems to be a car thief for hire, as he steals a Porsche with the intention of taking it to his home in Los Angeles. However, he insists on bringing attention to himself by driving recklessly, so it doesn't take all that long before the highway patrol spots him and one of the cops approaches him. Thankfully, Jesse has looked in the car's glove compartment, where he finds a gun. So, he can shoot the cop, not that this was what he meant to do, and head off to Los Angeles to try to get away. Naturally, the cop is going to be found, and when it does, Jesse is the prime suspect, to the point that his picture is already in the papers when he gets back to LA.

Jesse makes it back to Los Angeles, and sees that the cop's murder has already made the news. He looks at his calendar and sees a bunch of women's names on it, which he of course would know as old girlfriends although we don't. One of them is Monica Poiccard (Valerie Kaprisky), a French woman studying architecture at UCLA. Jesse immediately starts harassing her by showing up on campus and then being an utter jerk to her. But there are women dumb enough to want a bad boy, and Monica seems to be one of those women.

Jesse tries to convince Monica to go off to Mexico with him, he trying to get there to escape. She's ambivalent about it, but damn if the sex isn't spectacular. However, Jesse needs money to be able to live on once he gets to Mexico, and he doesn't have that in hand yet. That's going to require him to stay in Los Angeles for another day, and the cops are going to be on his case.

As I said in the opening paragraph, I really didn't care for the original French Breathless, although to be fair I'm not a big fan of the French New Wave. I had big problems with this Hollywood remake, but not quite for the same reasons. Jean-Paul Belmondo, who plays the killer in the original, is a bit more of a glib charmer, but still a somewhat annoying guy. Richard Gere plays the character (or the screenplay has him play it) as a much more obnoxious type of unlikeable antihero. The production design also is stylized in a way that I felt didn't really suit the material.

For once, I'm generally in agreement with the critics in my negative review of the movie, albeit for different reasons. While critics tend to love the French original and not see the need for a Hollywood remake, I didn't care for either version.