Breathless (1960)

Jean-Luc Godard's film Breathless (À bout de souffle) is one of the first films of the French New Wave. In this film, a young Frenchman is a thug who models himself after Humphrey Bogart. The film opens with him riding in a stolen car, being chased by a cop, and then shooting the cop. He falls in love with an American girl who works for the New York Harold Tribune and tries to convince her to go to Rome with him. For the most part, the plot doesn't seem all that significant and nothing much happens. The film is mostly people talking.

The film's two stars are Jean-Paul Belmondo who plays the Frenchmen and Jean Seberg as the American girl. Seberg was originally an American actress, but was generally regarded as terrible so she went to Europe where she became a famous actress of the French New Wave. Like Belmondo's, I found her performance in this film to be quite good.

Stylistically, this film is most famous for its jump cuts - cuts within continuous movement or dialogue, with no attempt made to make them match. While such a noticeable technique appears intentional, Godard did not intend to do this when he made the film. The original version of the film was 30 minutes too long. Rather than edit out scenes that he didn't find important, Godard instead edited out the portions of scenes that were less interesting creating an interesting effect that has since been duplicated in numerous films.

This film is also notable for being amongst the first films of the French New Wave. The French New Wave, influenced in part by Italian Neorealism and classical Hollywood cinema, is the birth of the modern film. The style essentially rejects classical cinematic form and embraces radical experiments with editing, visual style, and narrative. These films often feature fast dialogue, strange camera positioning, and low budgets.

While this film is essentially a love story, I found it to be quite brilliant. The two main characters in this film are quite interesting, the dialogue is oftentimes rather comical, and the style is quite memorable. This film heavily influenced Bonnie and Clyde but is superior in almost every way in my opinion. This film achieves a turning point in cinema just as Welles did with Citizen Kane before it and Griffith did The Birth of a Nation before that.

94/100
A

UP NEXT: To be determined.