Breathless

9/2/2018

A key film of the late Fifties/early Sixties French New Wave, <i>À bout de souffle</i> (Breathless) opens with suave lowlife Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo) stealing a car. When he's caught speeding on the way to Paris and pursued by the police, Michel kills the officer. Desperate to collect some money owed and make his escape to Italy, he hides out with Patricia (Jean Seberg), an American girl he had slept with once and who is oblivious to the danger he's in. This is one of the most influential films of all time in its liberal use of jump cuts, in idolizing American noir films and transferring that aesthetic to a foreign country, and its allusions to other films and even self-referentially to itself. Goddard left plenty of signs that he was seeking to overturn the staid French mai

3/14/2024

Jean-Paul Belmondo spends much of this film in just his boxers after his "Poiccard/Kovacs" character pinches a car, kills the pursuing police officer and the ends up taking refuge with his new journalism student friend "Patricia" (Jean Seberg). She's not quite aware of the extent of the trouble her new beau is in when he sets about trying to convince her that he has some cash coming and that they should go and live in Italy. His identity isn't exactly unknown to the cops either, and with his face plastered over the front page of every newspaper in Paris, his chances of attaining his idyll are beginning to look remote - especially as he has precisely no self-awareness as he travels the city for all to see. Of course, it has to be only a matter of time before "Patricia" finds out the truth a

7/9/2026

Summary: 10/10: a landmark film that invented the grammar contemporary cinema still speaks, and a sharper cultural critique than it's often given credit for. Taken out of its historical moment, Jean-Luc Godard's first feature isn't necessarily thrilling. But for 1960, it was groundbreaking, a film that shattered conventions so thoroughly that its innovations are now invisible, absorbed completely into the language of contemporary cinema. The technical aspects of Breathless remain totally relevant today: the revolutionary jump cuts, the handheld camera, the natural lighting, the guerrilla-style shooting without permits on Paris streets. Godard, working with cinematographer Raoul Coutard on a budget under $50,000 and a crew of just two people, invented techniques that would define inde