Breath­less (1960)

In some ways it is easy to for­get how amaz­ing Breath­less was when it was released 50 years ago. Its refusal to con­form to tra­di­tion­al nar­ra­tive rules and use of inno­v­a­tive tech­niques such as jump cuts, not only rebelled against the tra­di­tions of French Clas­si­cal Cin­e­ma but also struck a chord with audi­ences across the world who respond­ed to not only the vital­i­ty of Jean-Luc Godard’s film but to the pio­neer­ing spir­it of all those who were spear­head­ing the French New Wave.

But it is often the fate of inno­va­tors to go unrecog­nised for their achieve­ments, espe­cial­ly in cin­e­ma: after all, the inven­tive can often seem stale to those unim­pressed by the shock of the new.

Breath­lesshas man­aged to stand the test of time still feel­ing incred­i­bly fresh and excit­ing, even though the film is half a cen­tu­ry old. The plot of the film itself is still main­ly per­func­to­ry (rem­i­nis­cent of the great Hol­ly­wood films that were so ven­er­at­ed by Godard and the rest of the ​‘Cahiers du Ciné­ma’ crit­ics who made up the French New Wave) as small time crim­i­nal Michel Poic­card mur­ders a police­man and holes up with his lover as he attempts to keep away from the author­i­ties. But this is not a film about plot: it’s a film about moments, about refus­ing to fol­low the rules and about freedom.

Indeed Poic­card just may well be the embod­i­ment of the spir­it of the whole French New Wave move­ment. He’s the essence of non­con­for­mi­ty with a gal­vanis­ing pres­ence that has jus­ti­fi­ably earned Jean-Paul Belmondo’s per­for­mance an icon­ic sta­tus in cin­e­ma his­to­ry. His louche and child­ish charm must have felt so dif­fer­ent in a time when the major­i­ty of main pro­tag­o­nists were uptight good guys; cer­tain­ly, even in a day when anti-heroes lit­ter the screen, Poic­card is a star­tling exam­ple of sex appeal and nonchalance.

The same can be said for Jean Seberg as Patri­cia whose lib­er­at­ed atti­tude and intel­li­gence pro­vide a per­fect foil for Michel. The cen­tral sequence of Michel and Patri­cia in her flat, ban­ter­ing about love and life still seems a bril­liant­ly real and uncon­trived depic­tion of rela­tion­ship unfet­tered by the norms of soci­ety. Indeed, it is only Michel’s ulti­mate fate that would seem to restore the sta­tus quo but, even then, it seems to be out of respect to the crime genre than any moral­is­tic atti­tude. And it is respon­si­ble for the oft dis­cussed (and oft mis­trans­lat­ed) exchange between Michel and Patricia.

The free­dom extends to Godard’s and cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Raoul Coutard’s style which man­ages to be both nat­u­ral­is­tic and arti­fi­cial at the same time. The jump cuts, rather than being jar­ring, give the film much of its relent­less ener­gy whilst the inte­gra­tion of qua­si-doc­u­men­tary footage gives an almost sur­re­al air of authen­tic­i­ty amongst the tech­ni­cal ​‘tricks’.

There are times when the sta­tus of an icon­ic film is unde­served and often con­ferred due to an inabil­i­ty to dis­agree with received opin­ion. Breath­less is far from one of these films. With an impact on mod­ern cin­e­ma that is unde­ni­able, with film­mak­ers such as Scors­ese and Taran­ti­no all cit­ing its influ­ence (though, to be fair, the only per­son Taran­ti­no doesn’t seem to be influ­enced by is his post­man) – the film is also a stun­ning work in its right, full of pow­er and vital­i­ty that, well, is breathtaking.