Jean-Paul Belmondo, the splendor of the true

'At the End of the Getaway' (1960), with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg. Aymond Cauchetier, courtesy James Hyman Gallery, London

At the end of the getaway

it is not a movie, it is a legend.

As happened to Jean-Luc Godard himself, who from an early age was aware of the weight of his debut, Jean-Paul Belmondo was trapped for life in a character who today, more than six decades later, is an icon of history of the cinema.

Perhaps that explains why the actor himself published in 1963, just three years after its premiere, the book

premature memories with which the French actor was looking for a way to get away from the mask of that clever and impulsive street character, a petty criminal who fixed in popular memory the archetype of the young, innocent, sexy and foul-mouthed pimp.

More information

• French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo dies at 88

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Godard started

without really knowing where he was going.

He had only written the first sequence, the rest were single notes and literary quotes like the famous one

from Faulkner's

.

"Do you know William Faulkner?" Jean Seberg asks her lover.

"No, who is it?

Have you slept with him? ”, Belmondo answered him, who before the final sentence of the novel,“ Between pain and nothingness I choose pain ”, chose nothingness.

The idea was, starting from a conventional story, to rewrite the classic cinema that Godard had drawn on as a critic for

It wasn't about making movies, but about feeling it. According to Godard, he was searching for the central theme of

throughout the shoot. “Until, finally, I became interested in Belmondo. I saw it as a kind of block that had to be filmed to find out what was behind it ”. Seberg was another matter, a continuation of the character from

, which the filmmaker allowed to remain who he was.

Belmondo was 26 years old and did not improvise the dialogues, as has sometimes been said. Godard did not give them the written sequences, he blew out the sentences without them having to memorize them, and he never repeated the takes more than twice. Thus he achieved freshness in the replicas, that almost documentary quality that gave the scenes that air so many times imitated. For Godard, beauty is the splendor of the true and that is exactly what Belmondo is in that film.

Nothing has been the same in cinema since then, neither in European nor in American cinema. Belmondo with his friend Alain Delon became a myth and, although they moved away from the comparisons, with time the trajectory of Delon would win by a landslide. For Belmondo, with the cigar on his thick lips, his boxer nose and his Borsalino hat, that moment of truth in front of a camera was enough. Like when Jean Seberg asked the writer played by Jean-Pierre Melville at the Orly airport what his greatest ambition was and he replied that he was immortal, "and then ... die."