Breathless ending explained: the cop mistranslates Michel's last words to Patricia — and so do most English subtitles
Michel's dying line in Godard's debut is mumbled, mistranslated inside the film by a policeman, and then mistranslated again by the subtitles. Here's the French, and what each English version quietly changes.
The last exchange in Godard's debut runs four lines and involves three different versions of the same word. Two of those versions are wrong, and only one of the errors is a subtitling problem.
Michel Poiccard has been shot in the rue Campagne-Première, has run the length of it, and is lying in the road. Patricia catches up. Inspector Vital, played by Daniel Boulanger, is standing over him. Michel says something indistinct, dies, and Patricia asks the only question the film ends on.
The French
Here is what is actually said:
MICHEL: C'est vraiment dégueulasse.
PATRICIA: Qu'est-ce qu'il a dit?
VITAL: Il a dit que vous êtes vraiment "une dégueulasse."
PATRICIA: Qu'est-ce que c'est "dégueulasse"?
Michel's sentence is impersonal. C'est — it is. The whole situation, the bullet, the running, all of it: disgusting. No object, no target, nobody accused.
Vital's sentence is not impersonal. He replaces c'est with vous êtes, converts an adjective into a noun — une dégueulasse, a disgusting woman — and hands Patricia an insult that was never issued. That is the mistranslation the film is about. The policeman isn't translating French into English; he's translating a dying man's despair into a personal attack on the woman who informed on him, which is a piece of routine cruelty from someone who does this for a living.
Patricia's last line asks what a word means that was never applied to her. Then she touches her lips, copying Michel's own gesture.
What the subtitles do
Every English version has to choose which half of the trick to keep, and they choose differently:
- Early English release — "It's really disgusting" / "He said you are really disgusting" / "What is 'disgusting'?" Keeps the pivot, loses the noun.
- Fox-Lorber DVD (2001) — "It's disgusting, really" / "He said 'You're a real scumbag'" / "What's a scumbag?" Keeps the noun, and makes Michel sound like he's reviewing the weather.
- Criterion (2007 DVD, 2010 restoration) — "Makes me want to puke" / "He said you make him want to puke" / "What's that mean, 'puke'?" Keeps the redirection cleanly, drops the name-calling entirely.
None of them can carry both, because English has no everyday word that works as an adjective about a situation and a noun about a person in the same breath.
The mumble is a decision, not an accident
Belmondo's delivery is famously hard to make out, and French viewers argue about the line too. That ambiguity is manufactured. Raoul Coutard shot the film on an Eclair Cameflex, the only camera that would take the sprocket-hole stock he was using, and it was too loud to record sound with. The entire film was dubbed after the fact. Belmondo said that line into a microphone in a studio, with no traffic and no pressure, and it still comes out indistinct.
The film was shot in 23 days, between 17 August and 12 September 1959, for 400,000 francs — about $80,000, of which Jean Seberg took $15,000.
À bout de souffle opened on 16 March 1960 and sold over 2.29 million admissions in France. For the record: editor Cécile Decugis recalled that before release it carried a reputation as the worst film of the year.