A cinephile’s paradise, Paris is also a filmmaker’s dream set, its streets, cafés and métros starring throughout its hundred plus years of movie-making history. These places, rendered timeless on screen, exist in reality as well in the fading projections of our cinematic memories. For the first in this series, we revisit the rue Campagne Première as seen in Breathless.
“You know the young man you’re looking for?…well, I just saw him…he’s at 11, rue Première Campagne…yeah, 11, rue Campagne Première.” These fatal words, pronounced in sharp Yankee French by Patricia (Jean Seberg) as she rats out her gangster/lover (Jean-Paul Belmondo), culminate in Breathless’s famous final sequence: Belmondo’s endless, over-the-top death wobble and comic-tragic demise on the crosswalk bordering the Boulevard Raspail, followed by Seberg’s deadpan stare at the camera as she wonders out loud if dégueulasse really means what she thinks it does. The scene would go down in film history books as one of the most striking ruptures of cinema’s golden rule (“Don’t look at the camera!”), and along with the film’s other jump cuts, faux raccords, and overall play at discontinuity, would make Godard the nastiest of all flag-bearers in that moviemaking revolution known as the New Wave.
Situated in the northeast corner of the 14th arrondissement, the rue Campagne Première remains as banal and everyday as it appears on screen, the stray passersby as undisturbed by the presence of an unlikely movie tourist as they seemed in the film by the arrival of a late morning shoot-out. Just across the way sits the Montparnasse Cemetery where Seberg lies buried, a suicide at the age of 39, her prolific acting career marred by a chaotic personal life. A quick stroll to number 11, where the film’s lovers engage in the last of several Godardian tongue twisters (“I should have talked about you and you about me, but instead I talked about me and you about you.”) yields little more than a quiet, lackluster residence. Yet a peek next door at number 9 reveals an artist’s studio that was once home to the Fauvist painter Othon Friesz, the surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico, and Rainer Maria Rilke. Ever a champion of quotations, Godard may indeed have appreciated the idea that his hero, desperate for cash and a quick way out, was gunned down like a dog just beside the spot where the Austrian poet conceived many of the verses later found in a collection entitled, “The Book of Poverty and Death.”
Location: rue Campagne Première, 75014 Paris, métro Raspail or Vavin.
Film: “Breathless” (“A bout de souffle”) by Jean-Luc Godard, with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, 1959.
