Today the estimable Shout Factory releases the 1983 Jim McBride film “Breathless” on Blu Ray. It stars Richard Gere and Valerie Kaprisky in a loose-limbed lovers-on-the-run story, features a pretty groovy soundtrack comprising Jerry Lee Lewis, Mink De Ville and Sam Cooke songs along with a rather insistently overused Philip Glass track, and you can even catch a glimpse of Richard Gere‘s peen if that’s your thing. But none of that is the reason that “Breathless” is the curio that it is —it’s because the film has the sheer gall to be a Hollywood remake of the groundbreaking 1960 Nouvelle Vague film by Jean-Luc Godard that we talk about it at all.
Of course, remakes are mounted all the time. But a relatively unknown director (as McBride was) taking on the work of a monolithically accepted “auteur” is a little more unusual. And sometimes the reverse occurs, when a widely acclaimed filmmaker plunders someone else’s catalogue and remakes an existing film in their own image. We already looked at 10 Directors who Remade their Own Movies, but the release of “Breathless” (1983) along with all the chatter about the “Magnificent Seven” and “Scarface” remakes (both of which will technically be remakes of remakes) made us think we should look at some of those occasions where a film by a great director has been remade by a lesser filmmaker, or vice versa.
In selecting these ten examples, we’ve tried to stay away from films that are only believed to have influenced more recent takes (like “The Hidden Fortress” and “Star Wars“), unless there’s a solid credit somewhere down the line. We’ve also stayed away from films that are simply different versions of the same famous source material, so no “The Three Musketeers” or “The Wizard of Oz.” Instead we’ve tried to stick to direct film-to-film remakes, or at least those where we have some evidence that the later director had seen and been influenced by the earlier film, but that’s a pretty gray area. Mostly we just wanted to investigate a few of the less well-covered remakes in film history, so here are ten such and our considered verdict on which, if either, is worth your time (shocker: it’s not always the original!)
Original: “Breathless” (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960)
Remake: “Breathless” (Jim McBride, 1983)
Remaking any film takes a certain level of cojones —there’s a tacit implication that however much you may admire the original, you can improve upon it. So one has to admire the sheer ballsiness of looking at Godard’s seminal New Wave classic, inarguably one of the most influential and admired films ever made, and thinking “yeah, but there’s a few things I’d change…” It’s even more astonishing that Jim McBride, not exactly a huge name then or now, brought on the level
of financing and support that he did, all to turn out a curiously flat if quite well-made revamp of the Godard joint (whose script had input from Francois Truffaut and Claude Chabrol), this time detailing a doomed romance between a small-time American thief (Gere) and a pretty French student in LA (Valerie Kaprisky), as opposed to the doomed romance of the original which unfolds in Paris between a French hood (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and a gamine American student (Jean Seberg). The remake is a curious affair, nicely shot in an 80s neon-tinged way
and with more explicit sex and nudity, but one that only ever seems like a empty imitation of the to-the-bone coolness of the original. Where Belmondo could summon disaffection and cynicism with a tilt of his hat, Gere’s equivalent character is a twitchy, almost manic version —he talks to himself, sings along lustily to Jerry Lee Lewis and hurtles toward his own poetic showdown, ending in such an erratic manner that it’s not easy to care for or understand his character. In Godard’s version, that was the whole point —the filmmaker himself said he made “Breathless” as a means to show the world that there were other ways to make movies than the accepted classicist way. “Breathless” (1983) is Godard’s film reverse engineered back into being one of those accepted wisdom-style film —it’s perhaps less a remaking than an unmaking, though not one without its passing pleasures.
