Cast: Jean Paul Belmondo, Jean Seberg

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Screenplay: Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut

Running time: 90 mins

Genre: French Film/Gangster/Romance



CRITIQUE:

Jean-Luc Godard’s debut feature is nothing short of revolutionary. Of the films that populated the surge of nouvelle vague, Breathless is the iconography of the cool, the arty and the influential. It is an undeniably very French film, reverberating to the recent French cinema where mostly filmic exercise is anti-Hollywood, and it is here where exclaim of freedom is laid down. Throwing the whole Hollywood filmmaking rulebook straight out of the window, Godard breaks all conventions; 180 degree rule shattered, continuity editing snubbed, studio shooting sidestepped, and plot mechanics were treated as foul creatures. And rather opts for real locations, unknown actors, cinéma vérité documentary-feel shots, jump-cut editing, and psychological probing – that means more talk than walk, which would surely bore those that live across the Atlantic.


But this is artistic cinema, a postmodernist exercise of filmmaking, where Godard, ironically, parades his odium of the American milieu. Although anti-Hollywood, there are nods dispersed everywhere in this film, from gangster to cars, from women to Bogart. At the heart of this piece of cinema is a story about a gangster in love. Michel is a gangster wannabe, idolising the legendary noir figure of Humphrey Bogart, and even dresses and drags cigarette like him. The love object is the graceful form of Patricia, who delivers the tale’s surprising twist, a homage to the cinematic femme fatale. Here lucky unknowns Jean Paul Belmondo and American Jean Seberg are thrust to iconic stardom; Belmondo, with his lip-wiping, smooth-talking demeanour, and Seberg, blasé in her fashion statement (black-and-white stripes) and sporting a major haircut of the 60s, pre-empting Posh Spice, appear so cool you can’t resist staring at them more. As straightforward the story is, commencing with Michel’s runamok around France and concluding in a memorable tracking shot of him, literally in every sense, there’s the wordy middle half that would make people like Woody Allen and Quentin Tarantino smoulder in envy – a 24-minute bed scene. No sex, just conversation. The result is artsy-fartsy cinema, but a wonderful interplay between the two characters’ psyches, leaving audience guessing who is betraying whom.


VERDICT:

Incendiary, astoundingly important French film. This is Godard putting out two fingers against anything Americana, a fine kickstart to the French New Wave.


RATING: A+