Breathless (1960)

I've been watching Breathless for the first time in many years on the Sundance Channel. Jean-Luc Godard's cinema changing film about a young tough in love with American movies and an American girl changed European cinema.I don't know if it was for the better or worse. My only real memory of watching the film from my film class days was the sense that one could see how it was copied by other filmmakers of the period. I retained very little of the plot. Actually I retained very little of anything concerning the film after each of the two or three times I've seen it. Watching it again for the first time in probably five or six years I'm struck by how silly it all is. Once the height of fashion and hip coolness I was not so quietly giggling to myself. The film has not aged very well and has become almost a parody of itself. I could feel the pretensions flooding off the screen. This isn't to say the film isn't good, it is on some level, however I think its better if viewed in the context of when it came out, instead of what it is today. Forgive me if I offend with this position, but watching Jean Seberg struggle with her French and Jean-Paul Belmondo attempt to be cool, is almost too funny for words. (Belmondo reminded me of a cousin who always tried to be hip and cool and tough, but instead came off as silly). Worth a look if you're interested in milestones of the cinema, however I think you may be hard pressed to make it to the end with a straight face.

Fmovies: A bout de soufflé is not a good film, no matter what people might tell you. If it was, people would still be making movies like this that don't make any sense, and everyone would love them. The whole point, though, of French New Wave was that it was breaking the rules, and thus was more of an experiment than an attempt to make proper movies. Undoubtedly, some of the techniques and styles have had a lasting influence on modern cinema, so it's certainly fair to regard A bout de soufflé as an important piece of work.

However, many people will swear that they were thoroughly entertained by it, and will name it as one of their favourite films of all time. Those people are usually hideously pretentious, and if you disagree with them, you'll be told, or at least made to feel, that you are somehow intellectually deficient, and therefore unable to understand a work of such substance. The truth is, you're just perfectly sane, and know a turd when you see one.

Godard's 'Breathless' is regarded as one of the most important and influential movies of the modern era. And you'll get no argument from me on that score. But unlike other classics by Hitchcock, Welles, Lang, Kubrick or Peckinpah, it is a movie to be admired, but not I'm sad to say enjoyed. Watching it to me is almost like doing homework. You can immediately see in what ways it must have been daring and innovative at the time, and you can understand how many things about it, (especially the editing, which alternates jerky cuts with slow passages of dialogue about "nothing"), influenced everything from 'Easy Rider' to 'Reservoir Dogs'. But is it entertaining viewing? No. Belmondo and Seberg are cool and charismatic and act impressively, but you never care one hoot for their relationship or what happens to them. The crime angle of 'Breathless' is just a Macguffin, and Godard just uses it as an excuse for some (admittedly) very impressive shots. In many ways it is quite a cold movie. The viewer is deliberately kept at a distance, and this is its ultimate downfall. I would recommend 'Breathless' as as essential viewing for every film buff because of its technique and style, but if you were to ask me if I honestly ENJOY watching this movie I would have to say no, I don't.

Breathless fmovies. I finally did it. I finished watching À bout de souffle. I kept putting it off because I usually have problem when everybody tells me that such and such film is the epitome of its era or it breaks all the rules, starts the revolution, and reinvents the cinema. That's why, probably, I cannot like Citizen Kane - try to watch the arguably best film ever made - you will be under a lot of pressure.

Well, À bout de souffle does not put you under the pressure, it takes you for a ride, and you follow for 90 minutes its incredibly young characters, common crook (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and his American free-spirited girlfriend (Jean Seberg) on their journey on the streets of 1960-th Paris along with Raoul Coutard's legendary camera. I am not going to tell here how great the camera work was, how fantastic the music score and the views of Paris were - the fans of the film know that already. They also know about the beginning of French New Wave, and how it influenced the future cinema. I just want to say that the movie was made over forty years ago - the smoking was cool back then, and Belmondo made smoking look very sexy. Belmondo fascinates me in this film. I've seen him in a lot of later movies - he's always been good (I recommend Le Magnifique, 1973 and Le Professionnel,1981 ) - but in À bout de souffle he is not just good - he is embodiment of cool, his face changes its expression every moment, you can not take your eyes off him. Is it me or he does remind the very young Mick Jagger - not commonly handsome but irresistible and sexy? He and young (she was 21 at the time) Jean Seaborg made one of the best screen couples ever. My favorite scenes:

Michel drives the stolen car in the beginning of the film, and he starts to talk to us, the audience. The day is nice, the sun is shining, and the life is beautiful...

Michel and Patricia drive in the convertible. The wind plays with her short hair. We only see the back of her head and her neck. Michel tells her that he loves the girl with a beautiful neck, wrists, knees, but she is a chicken...

Patricia comes to the hotel to find Michel in her bed. They start talking about nothing and about very serious things. They smoke, she tries to find a good place for her new poster, and he wants to sleep with her. In the end of the scene, his face, he looks at her - there is love in that look...

There is more - I am sure everyone who saw it has his/her favorite scenes.

Together with François Truffaut's "The 400 Blows" (one of my favorites), Jean-Luc Godard's "Breathless" is considered the defining, instigating film of the French New Wave. It's more ironic and detached, less emotionally accessible than "The 400 Blows," and its technical innovations like jump cuts are perhaps even more surprising. For these reasons, I found "Breathless" easier to admire than to love—though by the end I grew to enjoy its too-cool- for-(film)-school tone.

Ironically, the pace of this movie isn't "breathless" at all. It begins abruptly and takes a while to get going: Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a character we barely know, drives a stolen car around, talks at the camera, and shoots a police officer who has tried to pull him over. Then he goes to Paris and tries to borrow money from some friends, while the police-shooting plot goes undeveloped. I only became fully engaged with the introduction of Patricia (Jean Seberg), a young American who sells newspapers on the Champs-Elysees. The relationship between Michel and Patricia is the heart of the film, especially a 25-minute-long scene in Patricia's apartment where the characters smoke, flirt, and laze around in bed, though nothing really happens. That's where I really started to admire "Breathless," because I was so captivated by a scene that, on paper, doesn't sound all that captivating.

Eventually the police catch onto Michel and launch a manhunt, but this doesn't really ratchet up the suspense. Instead, Michel is (or at least, Michel acts) aimless and nonchalant about the whole thing—this is not a typical "man on the run" movie. The cool jazz score adds to the hip, laid-back tone.

Since I didn't care for the movie too much until the scenes between Michel and Patricia, I believe a lot of the credit for the film's success has to go to the charismatic performances of Belmondo and Seberg. Belmondo, with a perpetual cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, is the archetypal cocky criminal who models himself after Humphrey Bogart (there's a great scene where he sees some Bogart photos and gets a vulnerable look in his eyes, as though saying "I'll never be as cool as this"). Seberg plays Patricia as a confused girl who is delighted by the attention she gets as an American in France.

It's easy to see why "Breathless" was so influential—the jump cuts, the ragged style perfectly match this story about amoral, aimless youth. Definitely a movie that expanded the range of stories the cinema can tell, and perhaps a major precursor to youth-oriented '60s culture. Nearly fifty years later, it still seems "hip," and still challenges our expectations of how movies should behave.

This is the one that started it all kids, the daddy of post-modern cinema. MTV jump cuts, fractured soundtrack and images aplenty

Self reflexive to the point that it not only acknowledges its own existence, it revels in it.

All style and no substance is considered a bad thing today, unless its Tarantino. Well, if it wasn't for Godard, chances are there would be no QT.

All the characters and images, and dialogue and sets are constructed from all aspects of life - Michel is a Bogart collage. Patricia apes everything she sees, from her Interviewee's facial gestures to Michel's own.

Don't let all this technical mumbo fool you, I did my thesis on Godard and would happily bore the ass off you with a lecture in great detail about this film, but the fact is, it's a stormer.

Grips you by the throat and shakes the hell out of you, and it doesn't let go until the final breath.

Fantastically, artistically magnificent. If Godard wanted to make his debut picture to show how well he understood American ideals and the history of cinema, he couldn't have made a better picture.

Top stuff French guy.