JAŠA KOCELI

BREATHLESS: NOW

Jaša Koceli and Eva Mahkovic; based on film Breathless by Jean-Luc Godard

Premiere 20.12.2014

Ljubljana City Theatre

105 min 

Paris, 1960s. Michel, in his late twenties, is unemployed,
a rogue, womanizer, pickpocket and car thief,
a hedonist with a cigarette constantly dangling from
his mouth; he is without money and serious plans for
the future, modelling himself on the film persona of
Humphrey Bogart. When he steals a car in Marseille
and shots a policeman by accident, he finds himself in
a grave conflict with the law. Just before that, in Nice,
he has fallen in love with Patricia, an American student
and aspiring journalist, who sells the New York
Herald Tribune on the streets of Paris, mostly living on
the money sent by her parents. Michel follows Patricia
to Paris and tries to talk her into escaping with him to
Rome. Patricia is ambivalent, reluctant to fall in love.
Although she and Michel are worlds apart, they soon
end up in a whirl of desire and evasion. Although the
police are closing in on Michel, he does not bother –
he keeps enjoying wild car rides and the taste of Patricia's
lips. The frantic race will stop only when he is left
breathless. Forever. The play is based on the cult film
Breathless by Jean-Luc Godard (1960). Breathless, together
with François Truffaut's The 400 Blows and Alain
Resnais's Hiroshima, Mon Amour, both released a year
earlier, brought international acclaim to the French
nouvelle vague. Godard's feature-length debut, whose
first draft plot was written by Truffaut, is the definitive
manifesto of the French New Wave: a striking, fresh
and prophetic classic