“The actors I admired were Bogart, Cagney, Cooper, Tracy. Great personalities. Real stars.” — Jean-Paul Belmondo

A tribute to Belmondo for his birthday, April 9

Jean-Paul Belmondo, icon of Ironic Self-Conscious Cool. Not self-conscious as insecure. But self-conscious as aware, outside of himself, winking at himself in the mirror, or winking out at us. He knew what he was doing. He understood his own references, reflected them, projected them back out. He absorbed half a century of movies and movie acting for Breathless, making the familiar poses and glances and behavior tics seem fresh and new, destabilized from context, even when the attitudes were well-worn archetypes stolen from Bogart and Brando. I’m not making a new observation when I say American moviegoers and critics gained confidence in the artistic output of classic Hollywood through the French’s passionate embrace. The French embraced our so-called “trash”. They loved our “shit”, the gangster movies, the detective and crime movies, all the pot-boiling B’s. They saw in all this more than we saw. They projected it back to us, and it seemed radical and different. Breathless cracked this open. Godard needed a male muse, needed somebody just as movie-mad, just as steeped in movie history, he needed a fantasist. He found one.