Godard, Jean-Luc

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    ‘Alphaville’: A Film That Feels Brand-New

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    Jean-Luc Godard’s hard-boiled sci-fi movie from 1965 returns in a restored version at IFC Center.Cinephiles of a certain age have a Jean-Luc Godard film that when first seen, blew their minds. Mine was Godard’s low-budget foray into dystopian science fiction, “Alphaville.”Having opened the 1965 New York Film Festival, which called it the “first successful incursion of pop art into the cinema,” “Alphaville” returns in a restored, re-subtitled print at the IFC Center, starting Dec. 15.Call it pop art, meta-noir, sci-fi neorealism or the underground precursor to the overblown, effects-driven superhero movies of the 21st century. “Alphaville” inserted itself into popular cinema by appropriating an existing movie icon, the hard-boiled detective Lemmy Caution, played in seven French thrillers by the frog-faced American actor Eddie Constantine.Thanks to Constantine, “Alphaville” is remarkably close to a “normal” movie (by Godardian standards). And thanks to Godard, Lemmy — one icon among many — lives in a self-aware movie universe. My own eureka moment came when, dispatched to find the German pulp character Harry Dickson (Akim Tamiroff), Lemmy asks him if their colleagues Dick Tracy and Flash Gordon are dead.“Alphaville” is pure pop in the form of gritty vérité — shot on high-speed, black-and-white film almost entirely at night and largely in the then-new Paris business district La Défense. As outrageously callous and bluntly stylized as a comic strip, mayhem is accentuated by Paul Misraki’s start-stop, hyper-melodramatic score, while tough-guy Lemmy quotes Paul Éluard.Inventive and pragmatic, Godard transformed ordinary objects into futuristic gizmos: That a jukebox stands for a spy console, a cigarette lighter receives radio transmissions, an electric fan denotes the supercomputer Alpha 60 and the computer’s flat, guttural croak is that of a man with a prosthetic voice box, is a form of surrealism.Godard was pragmatic in other ways, too. Richard Brody’s biography, “Everything Is Cinema,” suggests that “Alphaville” was designed to get Anna Karina, who divorced the director just before filming began, to say the words “I love you.” She does at the end of the film. Audiences did not. Present at the movie’s premiere, the Village Voice critic Andrew Sarris “felt waves of hatred washing up on the screen.”The New York Times critic Bosley Crowther, also there, noted that Godard’s “excessively cinematic prank,” provoked annoyance when, shifting gears midway through, it became “a tedious tussle with intellectual banalities.” Perhaps, but to paraphrase Umberto Eco’s essay on cult films and “Casablanca,” where two clichés make us laugh, a hundred clichés make a myth — in this case Orpheus and Eurydice. (In “Alphaville,” Cocteau’s version is referred to throughout.)Like “1984” and any number of recent opinion pieces, “Alphaville” equates totalitarianism with the debasement of language and allegiance to the algorithm. That it makes its points audio-visually may be why many artists prized the film. The conceptualist Mel Bochner celebrated “Alphaville” with a photo-text grid published in 1968 in Arts Magazine. Decades later, MoMA PS1 hosted a show of contemporary art inspired by Godard called “Postcards From Alphaville.”Those artworks have dated but the film hasn’t. Digitally restored, “Alphaville” not only looks but feels brand-new. The “intellectual banalities” that bored Crowther are so insistently contemporary that “Alphaville” could have been made in 2023. If by some time-traveling Borgesian twist of fate it were, Godard’s film would have been my candidate for the year’s best.AlphavilleOpens on Friday at the IFC Center in Manhattan; ifccenter.com. More

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      ‘Godard Cinema’ Review: A Convention-Defying Auteur

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      This documentary looks at the work of Jean-Luc Godard, who sought with each new work to confound assumptions about how movies could look and sound.Making sense of the career of Jean-Luc Godard is both impossible and contrary to the spirit of his art. More than any other filmmaker, Godard, over six decades of features, sought with each new work to confound assumptions about how movies could look and sound. He long ago left behind intelligibility, at least in the conventional sense.But if an overview were your goal, Cyril Leuthy’s documentary “Godard Cinema” — which had its premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September 2022, just eight days before Godard’s death at 91 — acquits itself reasonably well. It refuses to reduce Godard’s output to the relatively accessible French New Wave period and tries to deal with him in all his thorniness.There is Godard the film lover turned film director, who had made a decisive break with his childhood and who, beginning with “Breathless” in 1960, rewrote the rules of cinematic storytelling. His work continued to defy precepts of commercialism, language and politics. Interviewed in the documentary, Marina Vlady, the star of Godard’s “2 or 3 Things I Know About Her” (1967), recalls the difficulty of acting the complicated texts that the director would read into her earpiece.Leuthy’s survey doesn’t ignore Godard’s bizarre flirtation with Maoism or the abrasive, often-neglected films he made with the politicized Dziga Vertov Group, in a period that forced him to acknowledge the contradiction of making art collectively in an auteurist medium. (The filmmaker Romain Goupil recalls that holding majority votes during the editing process wasn’t really suited to Godard the poet.)Rebirth came, oddly, in part because of Godard’s interest in video. The 1975 unveiling of “Numéro Deux,” which harnessed and interrogated the technology, was “really a moment when Godard allows himself for the first time in a long time to say ‘I,’” the film historian Antoine de Baecque says. And from there, Godard never stopped.For many, the attraction at Film Forum, where “Godard Cinema” opens this week, is not the documentary but the short that precedes it, a final work from Godard screening under the title “Trailer of a Film That Will Never Exist: Phony Wars.” It is essentially storyboards in motion: The cinematographer Fabrice Aragno has described it as an offshoot of Godard’s preparations to adapt a 1937 novel, “False Passports,” that won its author, Charles Plisnier, the Goncourt Prize.The short is filled with cryptic witticisms (“It’s hard to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if it’s not there”), abstract artwork, photographs, film clips (from Godard’s own “Notre Musique”) and even Godard himself in voice-over explaining his ideas about Plisnier (“He was more like a painter than a writer”). That’s after the sound kicks in, which takes a while.Godard CinemaNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More

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      The Artists We Lost in 2022, in Their Words

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      Music innovators who sang of coal country and “Great Balls of Fire.” An actress who made a signature role out of a devilish baker who meets a fiery end. The trailblazing heart of “In the Heat of the Night.”The creative people who died this year include many whose lives helped shape our own — through the art they made, and through the words they said. Here is a tribute to just some of them, in their own voices.Sidney Poitier.Sam Falk/The New York Times“Life offered no auditions for the many roles I had to play.”— Sidney Poitier, actor, born 1927 (Read the obituary.)“People in the past have done what we’re trying to do infinitely better. That’s why, for one’s own sanity, to keep one’s own sense of proportion, one must regularly go back to them.”— Peter Brook, director, born 1925 (Read the obituary.)Ronnie Spector.Art Zelin/Getty Images“Every song is a little piece of my life.”— Ronnie Spector, singer, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)Yuriko.Jack Mitchell/Getty Images“Dance is living. Dance is, for me, it’s survival.”— Yuriko, dancer, born 1920 (Read the obituary.)Kirstie Alley.Vinnie Zuffante/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty Images“The question is, how do you create with what you have?”— Kirstie Alley, actress, born 1951 (Read the obituary.)Carmen Herrera.Todd Heisler/The New York Times“Every painting has been a fight between the painting and me. I tend to win. But you know how many paintings I threw in the garbage?”— Carmen Herrera, artist, born 1915 (Read the obituary.)“I decided that in every scene, you’re naked. If you’re dressed in a parka, what’s the difference if you’re dressed in nothing at all, if you’re exploring yourself?”— William Hurt, actor, born 1950 (Read the obituary.)Takeoff.Rich Fury/Getty Images For Global Citizen“You gotta have fun with a song, make somebody laugh. You gotta have character. A hard punchline can make you laugh, but you gotta know how to say it.”— Takeoff, rapper, born 1994 (Read the obituary.)“I love watching people get hit in the crotch. But only if they get back up.”— Bob Saget, comedian and actor, born 1956 (Read the obituary.)Olivia Newton-John.Las Vegas News Bureau/EPA, via Shutterstock“I do like to be alone at times, just to breathe.”— Olivia Newton-John, singer, born 1948 (Read the obituary.)“Movies are like clouds that sit over reality: If I do cinema well, I can uncover what is beneath, my friends, my allies, what I am, where I come from.”— Jean-Luc Godard, director, born 1930 (Read the obituary.)Sam Gilliam.Anthony Barboza/Getty Images“The expressive act of making a mark and hanging it in space is always political.”— Sam Gilliam, artist, born 1933 (Read the obituary.)“Everyone says that I was a role model. But I never thought of it when I was doing the music and when I was performing. I just wanted to make good music.”— Betty Davis, singer-songwriter, born 1944 (Read the obituary.)Nichelle Nichols.Albert L. Ortega/Getty Images“The next Einstein might have a Black face — and she’s female.”— Nichelle Nichols, actress, born 1932 (Read the obituary.)“If I could have dinner with anyone, dead or alive, it would be with Albert Einstein at Panzanella.”— Judy Tenuta, comedian, born 1949 (Read the obituary.)“In time, writers learn that good fiction editors care as much about the story as the writer does, or almost, anyway. And you really often end up, the three of you — the writer, and the editor, and the story — working on this obdurate, beautiful thing, this brand-new creation.”— Roger Angell, writer and editor, born 1920 (Read the obituary.)Jennifer Bartlett.Susan Wood/Getty Images“I spent 30 years trying to convince people and myself that I was smart, that I was a good painter, that I was this or that. It’s not going to happen. The only person that it should happen for is me. This is what I was meant to do.”— Jennifer Bartlett, artist, born 1941 (Read the obituary.)Christine McVie.P. Floyd/Daily Express, via Hulton Archive and Getty Images“I didn’t aspire to be on the stage playing piano, let alone singing, because I never thought I had much of a voice. But my option was window-dresser or jump off the cliff and try this. So I jumped off the cliff.”— Christine McVie, musician and songwriter, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)“Sometimes you have to put yourself on the edge. You go to the precipice and lean over it.”— Maria Ewing, opera singer, born 1950 (Read the obituary.)Taylor Hawkins.John Atashian/Getty Images“There’s so much in what I do that is beyond hard work — there’s luck and timing and just being in the right place at the right time with the right hairdo.”— Taylor Hawkins, drummer, born 1972 (Read the obituary.)“I was primarily an actress and not a pretty face.”— Angela Lansbury, actress, born 1925 (Read the obituary.)“I always try to improve upon what I’ve done. If something’s not working, I’ll change it to make it better. I’m an artist and a performer above all, and I don’t limit myself.”— Elza Soares, singer, born 1930 (Read the obituary.)Leslie Jordan.Fred Prouser/Reuters“I’m always working, always. I got to keep the ship afloat.”— Leslie Jordan, actor, born 1955 (Read the obituary.)“The reward of the work has always been the work itself.”— David McCullough, historian and author, born 1933 (Read the obituary.)“To me, sitting at a desk all day was not only a privilege but a duty: something I owed to all those people in my life, living and dead, who’d had so much more to say than anyone ever got to hear.”— Barbara Ehrenreich, author, born 1941 (Read the obituary.)James Caan.Jack Robinson/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images“Passion is such an important thing to have in life because it ends so soon, and my passion was to grow up with my son.”— James Caan, actor, born 1940 (Read the obituary.)Tina Ramirez.Michael Falco for The New York Times“Words are unnecessary when movement and feeling and expression can say it all.”— Tina Ramirez, dancer and founder of Ballet Hispánico, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)Claes Oldenburg.Tony Evans/Getty Images“I haven’t done anything on the subject of flies. It’s the sort of thing that could interest me. Anything could interest me, actually.”— Claes Oldenburg, artist, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)“A skull is a beautiful thing.”— Lee Bontecou, artist, born 1931 (Read the obituary.)“I like to write strong characters who are no better or worse than anybody else on earth.”— Charles Fuller, playwright, born 1939 (Read the obituary.)Ray Liotta.Aaron Rapoport/Corbis, via Getty Images“One review said I played a sleazy, heartless, cold person who you don’t really care about. Great! I love it; that’s what I played.”— Ray Liotta, actor, born around 1954 (Read the obituary.)Jerry Lee Lewis.Thomas S. England/Getty Images“There’s a difference between a phenomenon and a stylist. I’m a stylist, Elvis was the phenomenon, and don’t you forget it.”— Jerry Lee Lewis, musician, born 1935 (Read the obituary.)“All of us have something built into our ears that comes from the place where we grow up and where we were as children.”— George Crumb, composer, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)Anne Heche. SGranitz/WireImage, via Getty Images“People wonder why I am so forthcoming with the truths that have happened in my life, and it’s because the lies that I have been surrounded with and the denial that I was raised in, for better or worse, bore a child of truth and love.”— Anne Heche, actress, born 1969 (Read the obituary.)Louie Anderson.Gary Null/NBCUniversal, via Getty Images“That’s my goal every night: Hopefully at some point in my act, you have forgotten whatever trouble you had when you came in.”— Louie Anderson, comedian and actor, born 1953 (Read the obituary.)“Adult human beings live with the certainty of grief, which deepens us and opens us to other people, who have been there, too.”— Peter Straub, author, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)Ned Rorem.Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times“I believe in the importance of the unimportant — in the quotidian pathos.”— Ned Rorem, composer, born 1923 (Read the obituary.)Gilbert Gottfried.Fred Hermansky/NBC, via Getty Images“I don’t always mean to offend. I only sometimes mean to offend.”— Gilbert Gottfried, comedian, born 1955 (Read the obituary.)“Merce Cunningham is quoted somewhere as saying he wanted a company that danced the way he danced. I kept doing the same thing. And I began to wonder why I was insisting that they be as limited as I am.”— David Gordon, choreographer, born 1936 (Read the obituary.)Hilary Mantel.Ellie Smith for The New York Times“The universe is not limited by what I can imagine.”— Hilary Mantel, author, born 1952 (Read the obituary.)“Getting the right people with a shared vision is three-quarters of the battle.”— Anne Parsons, arts administrator, born 1957 (Read the obituary.)Paula Rego.Rita Barros/Getty Images“My paintings are stories, but they are not narratives, in that they have no past and future.”— Paula Rego, artist, born 1935 (Read the obituary.)Javier Marías.Quim Llenas/Getty Images“When you are addressing your fellow citizens, you have to give some hope sometimes, even if you want to say that everything is terrible, that we are governed by a bunch of gangsters. In a novel, you can be much more pessimistic. You are more savage, you are wilder, you are freer, you think truer, you think better.”— Javier Marías, author, born 1951 (Read the obituary.)“Art is not blameless. Art can inflict harm.”— Richard Taruskin, musicologist, born 1945 (Read the obituary.)“I am a worker who labors with songs, doing in my own way what I know best, like any other Cuban worker. I am faithful to my reality, to my revolution and the way in which I have been brought up.”— Pablo Milanés, musician, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)Peter Bogdanovich.Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images“Success is very hard. Nobody prepares you for it. You think you’re infallible. You pretend you know more than you do.”— Peter Bogdanovich, director, born 1939 (Read the obituary.)Loretta Lynn.CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images“I think the highest point of my career was in the late ’70s. I had No. 1 songs, a best-selling book and a movie made about my life. But I think it was also the lowest point for me as well. Life gets away from you so fast when you move fast.”— Loretta Lynn, singer-songwriter, born 1932 (Read the obituary.)Thich Nhat Hanh.Golding/Fairfax Media, via Getty Images“Many of us have been running all our lives. Practice stopping.”— Thich Nhat Hanh, monk and author, born 1926 (Read the obituary.)Photographs at top via CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images; Anthony Barboza/Getty Images; Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images; Albert L. Ortega/Getty Images. More

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      ‘See You Friday, Robinson’ Review: Dear Godard

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      In Mitra Farahani’s film, Jean-Luc Godard and the Iranian writer-director Ebrahim Golestan undertake an epistolary dialogue, puttering and pondering at their homes.In “See You Friday, Robinson,” Mitra Farahani orchestrates a freewheeling correspondence between Ebrahim Golestan, the Iranian director and writer, and Jean-Luc Godard, who spent 60-plus years reinventing cinema. The playfully profound film connects the pair through word and image, as they exchange emails, putter, and ponder, one in Sussex, England, the other in Rolle, Switzerland.Farahani marries homebody scenes to a Godardian style of compressed reflections and audiovisual flourishes. Golestan, a retiring figure in a Gothic mansion, puzzles over Godard’s sometimes nutty-sounding koans, which arrive with attachments such as Goya’s “Saturn Devouring His Son,” a clip from the dolphin-dog friendship film “Zeus and Roxanne,” and selfies.Godard is by turns merry and moody, with intimations of mortality in his ruminations; a touching camaraderie emerges when both men weather hospital visits. Godard’s laundry-draped domesticity is endearing, and his hands-on approach to working with images — watching and making them — remains invigorating.Golestan, a key figure in Iran’s pre-revolutionary cognoscenti linked to the poet Forough Farrokhzad, yields the perspective of a monumental exile: impressed by Godard but readily skeptical. “It’s fine if he’s saying something brilliant that I don’t get,” he says, musing on Godard’s Christian upbringing and whether he has a female companion. His letters sound more traditionally discursive than Godard’s, suggesting a greater contrast between modernist sensibilities.With Godard’s recent death, Farahani (who co-produced Godard’s film “The Image Book”) also gives us a fond remembrance, like a drink with an old friend who never stopped thinking onscreen.See You Friday, RobinsonNot rated. In French and Persian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Adieu Godard’ Review: A Poor Imitation

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      This limp satire about an Indian villager’s encounter with the movies of Jean-Luc Godard rehashes regressive stereotypes and squanders a potent premise.Amartya Bhattacharyya’s “Adieu Godard,” about a porn-addicted Indian villager who chances upon the French classic “Breathless” (1960), tries to milk comedy from a condescending premise: that uneducated villagers are too dumb to understand the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard. Instead, this limp satire only proves that no one fails to understand Godard as spectacularly as filmmakers who think they do.In an East Indian village, a bushy-haired old man, Ananda (Choudhury Bikash Das), spends his days watching foreign pornographic films with his crew of creeps — while his wife and daughter struggle to tune out the moans that sound throughout their house. One day, the local video store owner hands Ananda a DVD of “Breathless” while clearing his inventory. Ananda’s friends are infuriated by the movie: “No song, no dance, no fight, no romance … and it’s a film?” But Ananda is mesmerized, so much so that he decides to organize a French film festival.About a third into the film, Bhattacharyya yanks us out of this narrative — told in black and white — into a color track in which Ananda’s daughter, Shilpa (Sudhasri Madhusmita), relates her father’s story to her filmmaker boyfriend. Her unreliable narration is one of the film’s several aspirational Godardian flourishes, including Dutch angles, nonlinear editing and long conversations about sex and cinema.But it’s a film-school pastiche of the French director’s style, with none of the forward-thinking intellectual curiosity of his movies. Instead, “Adieu Godard” rehashes regressive stereotypes, taking potshots at a mute “simpleton” and turning Shilpa into a vessel for a muddled, moralistic lesson on misogyny. The film looks down the nose at its rural characters, squandering a potent premise about how cinema travels across borders.Adieu GodardNot rated. In Odia and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      Jean-Paul Belmondo, Magnetic Star of the French New Wave, Dies at 88

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      He was compared to Marlon Brando and James Dean for his acclaimed portrayals of tough, alienated characters, most memorably in Godard’s “Breathless.”Jean-Paul Belmondo, the rugged actor whose disdainful eyes, boxer’s nose, sensual lips and cynical outlook made him the idolized personification of youthful alienation in the French New Wave, most notably in his classic performance as an existential killer in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless,” died on Monday at his home in Paris. He was 88.His death was confirmed by the office of his lawyer, Michel Godest. No cause was given.Like Humphrey Bogart, Marlon Brando and James Dean — three American actors to whom he was frequently compared — Mr. Belmondo established his reputation playing tough, unsentimental, even antisocial characters who were cut adrift from bourgeois society. Later, as one of France’s leading stars, he took more crowd-pleasing roles, but without entirely surrendering his magnetic brashness.Like Bogart, Mr. Belmondo brought craggy features and sometimes seething anger to the screen, a realistic counterpoint to more conventionally handsome romantic stars. Like Dean, he became one of the most widely imitated pop culture figures of his era. And like Brando, he was often dismissive of pretentiousness and self-importance among filmmakers.“No actor since James Dean has inspired quite such intense identification,” Eugene Archer wrote in The New York Times in 1965. “Dean evoked the rebellious adolescent impulse, as fierce as it was gratuitous, a violent outgrowth of the frustrations of the modern world. Belmondo is a later manifestation of youthful rejection — and more disturbing. His disengagement from a society his parents made is total. He accepts corruption with a cynical smile, not even bothering to struggle. He is out entirely for himself, to get whatever he can, while he can. The Belmondo type is capable of anything.”His leading role in “À bout de souffle” — released in the United States in 1961 as “Breathless” — was instantly recognized as trendsetting; subsequent imitators only cemented its importance. Mr. Belmondo’s mop of unruly hair, the way he peered at the world through a twisting web of cigarette smoke, and the way he obsessively massaged his thick, feminine lips with his thumb were so vivid and evocative that they quickly became global signposts of rebellion.Mr. Belmondo in “Breathless.” His on-screen mannerisms became global signposts of rebellion.Films-Around-The -WorldMr. Belmondo was 28 and Mr. Godard was 26 when “Breathless” was being made. The film was based on an idea by François Truffaut, another icon of the nouvelle vague, and began shooting in Paris without a script. Mr. Godard used a hand-held camera — except in the street scenes, when he would sometimes mount the camera on a borrowed wheelchair — and let everyone improvise. The resulting film was rough and ill-shaped, but it had a sense of emotional honesty and verisimilitude that made it electric. Many mainstream critics seemed unsure what to make of it.Bosley Crowther wrote in The Times: “It goes at its unattractive subject in an eccentric photographed style that sharply conveys the nervous tempo and the emotional erraticalness of the story it tells. And through the American actress, Jean Seberg, and a hypnotically ugly new young man by the name of Jean-Paul Belmondo, it projects two downright fearsome characters.”Many critics found Mr. Belmondo’s amoral antihero a little too strong. But others found in the role a raw truthfulness and a thematic boldness at odds with the bulk of what was coming out of Hollywood studios.Restless and a Little BoredMr. Belmondo followed up “Breathless” with a series of celebrated turns for other New Wave directors and was soon widely seen as the movement’s leading interpreter — although in later years he told interviewers that some of the most intellectually ambitious efforts he had been involved in had bored him.When he starred as a steelworker opposite Jeanne Moreau in Peter Brooks’ “Moderato Cantabile” (1960), he said the script, by the French novelist Marguerite Duras, was too intellectual for his taste. He frequently expressed ambivalence about working for esoteric directors like Mr. Brooks, Alain Resnais and Michelangelo Antonioni.In other roles Mr. Belmondo was a Hungarian who gets romantically involved with a Provençal family in Claude Chabrol’s “À double tour” (1959) and a young country priest in “Leon Morin, Priest” (1962). He also helped his co-star, Sophia Loren, win an Academy Award in Vittorio De Sica’s “Two Women” (1961), a drama set during World War II in which he played a young Communist intellectual in mountainous central Italy.By the mid ’60s, though, he was chafing at playing the young antihero in film after film.“Lots of times, I’d be out with a chick and some kid would want to give me a bad time,” Mr. Belmondo told an interviewer. “I used to fight it out with them. It’s the same now. Everyone wants to say he’s flattened Belmondo.”The turning point for him came in Philippe De Broca’s “That Man From Rio,” a 1964 over-the-top spy thriller that played like a parody of James Bond. Audiences loved it, and they loved Mr. Belmondo in it. More important, Mr. Belmondo loved doing it. Although some critics who revered the more difficult work of the French New Wave derided Mr. Belmondo as a sell out, he told interviewers that this film remained his favorite.Mr. Belmondo in “That Man From Rio” (1964), an over-the-top spy thriller. It was a turning point for the actor, who had begun chafing at being typecast as a young antihero.Cohen Media GroupLater in his career Mr. Belmondo professed an unpretentious modesty, shrugging off his success, but at his box-office height in the 1960s, he was anything but modest. In an interview with the film critic Rex Reed in 1966, he all but sneered at American fans who were lining up to see his movies.“I do not blame them,” he said, puffing on a cigar and stretching out his long legs underneath a table at Harry’s Bar in Venice. “I am worth standing in line to see.”By this time there were rumors that despite having been married since 1955 to Elodie Constantin, a former ballerina, Mr. Belmondo was involved with other women. When Mr. Reed asked him about this, he shrugged that off, too.“Listen, I am only 32 years old,” he said. “I’m not dead. And please remember, I am French. I am happily married this year, but next year? Who knows?”A year later the marriage had ended in divorce. Mr. Belmondo had three children with Ms. Constantin. The eldest, Patricia, died in a fire in 1994, but their younger daughter, Florence, and a son, Paul, survive him.The divorce was rumored to have resulted from a romance by Mr. Belmondo with one of his co-stars, Ursula Andress. He and Ms. Andress did have a long-term public relationship after the divorce. He was later romantically involved with another actress, Laura Antonelli. But not until 2002, when he was 70 years old, did he marry again, to 24-year-old Nathalie Tardivel. That marriage ended in divorce six years later. They had a daughter, Stella, who also survives him.A Left Bank BoyhoodJean-Paul Belmondo was born on April 9, 1933, in the middle-class Parisian suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine. His family moved to the city’s Left Bank when he was a boy, and he grew up in the neighborhoods around Montparnasse and Saint-Germain-des-Prés. His father, Paul Belmondo, who was born in Algiers to a family of Italian origin, was a highly regarded sculptor. He later told interviewers that his son had been a tempestuous boy who had gotten into frequent scraps and did poorly in school.The boy’s mother, Madeline Rainaud-Richard, pushed him to do better, but he resisted, Mr. Belmondo later recalled. Finally, he dropped out of school altogether as a teenager. At 16, he became an enthusiastic amateur boxer (although his famous smashed nose came not from an organized bout but from a playground dust-up), giving it up only when he turned to acting.“I stopped when the face I saw in the mirror began to change,” he said.For several years, until he was 20, his parents paid for acting lessons at a private conservatory. After a six-month military tour in Algeria, he returned to Paris in 1953 and was accepted into the Conservatoire National d’Art Dramatique, where he studied for three years. The school, a conservative one, didn’t know what to do with the insolent young man who sauntered onto the stage in a Molière play with his hands in his pockets.When, at his graduation, in 1956, Mr. Belmondo was awarded only an honorable mention by his teachers, the other students hoisted him on their shoulders and carried him from the theater as he flashed an obscene gesture at the judges.Mr. Belmondo and Catherine Deneuve in François Truffaut’s 1969 movie “Mississippi Mermaid.” Film DeskFor all his flamboyance and occasional fistfights, Mr. Belmondo was said to be a consummate professional on the set. Although in later years he continued to work now and then with the great directors of the New Wave — most notably with Truffaut in “Mississippi Mermaid” (1969) — most of his energies went into mainstream favorites. Many of his films after the mid-1960s were made by his own production company.More and more Mr. Belmondo became known for popular adventures, usually comic thrillers. And he became famous for elaborate stunts in which he took great pride in performing himself. He hung from skyscrapers, leapt across speeding trains, drove cars off hillsides. Co-stars said he seemed all but fearless. While shooting one scene in South America, he was warned that a river, into which he was about to plunge for a scene, was filled with poisonous snakes and piranha. Mr. Belmondo grabbed a chunk of corned beef and slung it into the murky water. When nothing happened, he jumped in and filmed the scene.He said he had decided, “What the hell, if they’re not going to chew on that, they’re not going to eat me.”Finally, an injury during the filming of “Hold-Up” in 1985, when he was 52, forced him to leave the stunts to the stunt men.Hollywood Was Not for HimThroughout, the Belmondo cult endured, though more in France than around the world. His French fans knew him by his nickname, Bebel (pronounced bay-BELL).No matter the scene, no matter the co-stars, whatever mayhem was breaking out onscreen, Mr. Belmondo was always able to affect a calm, cool remove, as though he was more amused than aroused by the activity swirling around him. He brought a touch of comedy to his action roles and a hint of danger to his comic roles; one could well imagine him playing the reluctant, wisecracking hero in American action series of the 1980s like “Die Hard.”Mr. Belmondo never made the transition to Hollywood, largely because he didn’t want to. “Why complicate my life?” he said. “I am too stupid to learn the language and it would only be a disaster.”Mr. Belmondo in 2007. By choice he never made the transition to Hollywood. Joel Saget/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn 1989 he was awarded the Cesar Award for best actor, the French equivalent of the Oscar, for his performance in Claude Lelouch’s “Itineraire d’un enfant gate,” playing a middle-aged industrialist who fakes his death and then sails the world.By this time he had slowed his frenetic pace, making only nine movies in the 1980s, compared to 41 in 1960s and 16 in the 1970s. He cut back even more in the ’90s, when he made only six films, but this was due in part to a belated career shift. Mr. Belmondo had not appeared in a live production since 1959 when he returned to the theater in 1987. Particularly well-regarded was his sold-out run as “Cyrano de Bergerac” in Paris in 1990.A stroke in 2001, however, forced him to stop working. Not until eight years later was be back before the cameras, shooting “Un homme et son chien” (“A Man and His Dog).” Released in 2009, it tells the story of an older gentleman who, accompanied by his loyal dog, suddenly finds himself without a home.Late in life, when he was a little thicker and much grayer, Mr. Belmondo liked to affect some of the self-effacing modesty that was noticeably absent when he was at his peak in the 1960s.When an interviewers asked him to explain his enduring popularity, especially with women, Mr. Belmondo responded with his usual casual shrug.“Hell, everyone knows that an ugly guy with a good line gets the chicks,” he said.Aurelien Breeden contributed reporting. More