Charlotte (Anne Collette) returns to the apartment of her former boyfriend, Jean (Belmondo), for reasons unclear. As she says very little - nothing, really - Jean takes it upon himself to launch into a 12 minute tirade, doing his best to beat her down into submission for leaving him. His tirade ranges from blaming her for their problems to shaming her for leaving him to alluding that he might be generous enough to take her back. Charlotte listens and spends plenty of time mocking him, usually with faces made behind his back. Jean plays a fool, and when the punchline comes, Charlotte has the last laugh and Jean has been humiliated.
It's a setup Godard must have enjoyed because he returned to it more than once. He even used Belmondo again for his first feature and cast Jean Seberg, an actress not considerably different in appearance from Anne Collette. But was Charlotte et son Jules a kind of preliminary run before Breathless? Actually, no. Aside from a few conventions, like the musical score popping in and out, and the man being humiliated at the hands of the woman, there's little here to match up to later Godard works. The film also states in its credits that it is an homage to Jean Cocteau but there's not much linking it to him either. No, what makes this one important is that it gave Godard himself the desire to do more and branch out into feature work.
Jean-Luc Godard began his career as a film critic, published by his 21st birthday and enjoying the role of an iconoclast to the French film establishment early on. Godard relished the American filmmakers, directors like Howard Hawks, and eventually wanted to try his own hand behind the camera. Working with fellow film critic Francois Truffaut, who helped Godard outline the story for Breathless, Godard would become one of the most important directors of the French New Wave, a cinematic movement in which directors Truffaut, Godard, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol, and others, challenged the French film industry's status quo and revolutionized cinema in the sixties.
Jean-Paul Belmondo would go on to become a star thanks to Godard's first feature, Breathless, and became so big in France he was able to act as a guarantor of financing for Godard's tenth film, Pierrot Le Fou.
Anne Collette did only a few more films, in small roles, including a brief appearance in Who's That Knocking at My Door (1967), Martin Scorsese's first feature film. After one more film appearance, in 1968, she left the movies for good.
Jean-Luc Godard, of course, continued a film career that has spanned multiple decades and gone from one century to the next. His is one of the few careers to move brazenly from one period to another, abandoning comfort zones in pursuit of trying something new and different. It is always interesting to see where a director starts and if that start holds any clues to his later career. Charlotte et son Jules provides a few clues - similar character treatments, soundtrack inconsistencies - but like many early works of legendary directors, stands more as an example of how far the director has travelled since, and how much there is left to examine. If we were to look at the early work of Jean-Luc Godard and feel we'd already seen it all, there'd be no place left to go. Charlotte et son Jules is simply a starting point but one that leads to a remarkable cinematic destination.
By Greg Ferrara
