World Cinema: Films -- Breathless (1960)

"The most important of the New Wave films
[and] also the most passionate."
—Andrew Sarris

À bout de souffle (1960)

Impéria Films, Société Nouvelle de Cinéma.
B&W, 89 minutes.

Shot on a shoestring and none the worse for it, Jean-Luc Godard's gritty and engaging first feature, which had an almost revolutionary impact when it was first released in 1960, lays down most of the Godardian repertoire that his later films would build upon: male bravado spiced with plug-ugly mugging and amusing self-mockery (brought to perfection in Jean-Paul Belmondo's wonderful performance); a fascination with female beauty and treachery (the indelible Jean Seberg as the archetypal American abroad); an emulation of the American gangster movie (with reverent nods to Humphrey Bogart, Monogram Pictures, Dashiell Hammett, Samuel Fuller, and Jean-Pierre Melville—a predecessor in this sort of French connoisseurship, who appears as the first of Godard's fatherly sages, playing a novelist interviewed at an airport), and a love-hatred for America in general; a radical employment of jump cuts that has the effect of a needle skipping gaily across a record; a taste for literary, painterly, and musical quotations, as well as original aphorisms; and a restless, witty sense of fun that can make the unexpected happen at almost any moment. Less characteristic of Godard's later work is the superb jazz score (by French pianist Martial Solal), a relatively coherent and continuous narrative, and postsynchronized dialogue. Jean-Paul Sartre declared this a masterpiece at an early Paris screening, and there's certainly no doubt that this is the quintessential existentialist movie in style as well as attitude. Belmondo plays a small-time hood on the run after killing a cop, and Godard himself, in a cameo, plays the informer who recognizes him on the street. Characteristic of Godard's irreverent use of montage is a brief sequence that was cut by the French censors: de Gaulle following Eisenhower in a parade down the Champs-Elysees, followed by Belmondo chasing after Seberg on the sidewalk. In short, mandatory viewing.

—Jonathan Rosenbaum