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Breathless memories of Godard classic are far from vague

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CROYDON COMMENTARY: A recent American movie, a hommage to a French master, has PETER GILLMAN considering the importance of words, and reminiscing about a date in a long-lost South Croydon cinema

So who remembers the Croydon Classic?

This was the cinema in South Croydon, at the start of Brighton Road, which during its heyday in the 1950s and early 1960s offered a rich fare for film-lovers, from classic Hollywood movies to art-house gems that struggled to get a showing elsewhere.

It was there, on April 22, 1960, that Leni (my future wife) and I saw Jazz on a Summer’s Day for the first time. I can date the occasion precisely because it was Leni’s 17th birthday and also our first date. We’ve been married now for 63 years.

We were fans of jazz as well as movies, and another of our favourite hangouts was the Croydon Jazz Club at the Star pub in Broad Green, run by the indefatigable Frank Getgood. Jazz on a Summer’s Day, filmed at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival in America, featured jazz giants such as Louis Armstrong, Gerry Mulligan and Thelonious Monk.

It delighted us so much that, over the years, we saw it half a dozen times.

The Classic was a stunning art deco building, dating from the silent movie days and refurbished in the 1930s, with a snug, comforting ambience. We remember it with equal fondness for a second movie which we saw even more times than Jazz on a Summer’s Day. That was the French film A Bout de Souffle, also released in 1960. The first film directed by Jean-Luc Godard, its English title was Breathless and it rendered us precisely that.

The story centres on a pair of star-crossed lovers: a petty crook named Michel Poiccard, played by Jean-Paul Belmondo, and an American student in Paris named Patricia Franchini, played by Jean Seberg, who is first seen selling the New York Herald Tribune on the Champs-Élysées.

Poiccard is fixated on Franchini who, in turn, is intrigued by him. For most of the film the pair are on the run after Poiccard casually shoots a traffic cop. Franchini eventually betrays Poiccard to the police and he dies in a street shoot-out.

The film was technically radical, with frequent jump cuts, natural lighting, and a jazzy score. Much of it was improvised between the actors and Godard, who decided each morning what he was going to shoot. It paid tribute to numerous previous films, directors and actors, most notably Humphrey Bogart, against whom Poiccard liked to measure himself.

The characters’ motivations were sometimes hard to decode, which was one reason we kept returning to it, transfixed as we were by its mix of existentialism and nihilism, its freewheeling nature that comprised far more than its contributory parts. It was a perfect herald for the 1960s, when so much else of traditional culture was jettisoned or refigured.

And this month, we were given a chance to recapture those memories when we saw the film Nouvelle Vague, or New Wave. It was directed by American Richard Linklater, who named it after the innovative film movement of which A Bout de Souffle was a seminal component. It is a heartfelt celebration of Godard’s film, a reverential hommage with jump cuts, fragments of a jazz score and a stellar performance by Zoey Deutch as Jean Seberg.

Guillaume Marbeck was not quite as convincing as Belmondo but his version of the final death scene was compelling.

For devotees of the original, such as us, the new film played an alluring trick, namely to repeat a key word at frequent intervals.

The word was dégueulasse, which the subtitles translated in several different ways, including sordid, disgusting and shit.

It is crucial to the original film, as it is the last word spoken by Poiccard/Belmondo as he lies dying in the roadway, watched by Franchine/Seberg and the cop who shot him.

The closing dialogue unfolds like this:

Poiccard: “C’est vraiment dégueulasse.” (It is really disgusting)
Franchini: “Qu’est-ce qu’il a dit?” (What did he say?)
Cop: “Il a dit, ‘Vous êtes vraiment dégueulasse’.” (He said, ‘You are really disgusting’)
Franchini (looking into the camera): “Qu’est que c’est, dégueulasse?” (What does that mean?)

Francini then turns her back on the camera and the film closes with the word Fin.

The original film thus ends in an ironic statement of misunderstanding or incomprehension on Francini’s part.

However, the ending also touches on a long-standing grievance of mine concerning the English subtitles to the original film, in which Poiccard’s dying words – “C’est vraiment dégueulasse” – are translated not as “It is really disgusting” but as “You are really disgusting.”

In the original French version, Poiccard blames not Franchini but his life or destiny for his fate, and it is the cop who twists this into an accusation against his lover, Franchini. The mistranslation in the subtitle of Poiccard’s final words, which is repeated in the Wiki online entry about the film, is therefore a crucial misreading of Godard’s message and his movie: the two lovers’ relationship is both transcendent and doomed.

I suppose it is a measure of the impact the film had on me that I should care about a seemingly minor matter such as this. Nouvelle Vague will be shown at the David Lean Cinema in central Croydon on February 26.

As for the Classic in South Croydon, after some tribulations, which included a spell as a soft-porn venue and strip-joint, its life as a cinema came to an end in 1973. After reincarnations as a restaurant and night club, and then as a comedy club, it is now an Indian restaurant, although only a fragment of its old façade remains.

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