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Breathless (A Bout De Souffle)
Release Date: July 7th 2000
Distributor: Optimum
Certificate: 15
Starring: Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean Seberg, Daniel Boulanger, Jean-Pierre Melville, Henri-Jacques Huet
Director: Jean-Luc Goddard
Running Time: 90 mins
The 'Breathless' we are dealing with here is not the appalling 1983 crime against humanity with Richard Gere, but possibly one of the most influential movies ever made. Giving the film it's proper French title, 'A Bout De Souffle', this 1959 classic was Jean Luc Godard's first feature and launched Godard and the French New Wave ('La Nouvelle Vague') into a wonderful era of creativity, discovery and critical acclaim.
Jean-Paul Belmondo stars as a vicious petty crook, Poiccard who has ideas above his station and seems to think of himself as more of a cool, streetwise, Humphrey Bogart figure, a fact reflected in the way he walks, talks and even smokes a cigarette. After stealing a car and killing a policeman he flees to Paris where he hides out and meets an intelligent, stunning American woman, Patricia (Jean Seberg) with whom he becomes lovers. There is an intensity in their relationship that mirrors the division between them, both intellectually and morally, leaving one feeling with the growing inevitability that betrayal and tragedy is just around the corner.
As Godard's homage to American gangster movies, 'Breathless' is cooler than cool, visually upbeat and fast moving, sometimes disorientating with it's shakey hand-held camera tracking, sweeping, panning shots and it's frantic incision into the hustle and bustle of Paris street life. But there is also a gripping sense of the absurd, especially with the main characters being so untypical of American hoods and their molls: Patricia would never have appeared in any Bogart/Cagney/Mitchum movie because she is too clever by far and not the archetypal dizzy-headed, blond non-entity (dig the seriously unhip hair-do, which ironically spawned a generation of copycats on the chic Parisian streets). Poiccard lives his Bogart persona so intensely that even his death seems to be his homage to the classic gangster demise, something which is at once bizarre and almost risible in it's melodramatic intensity.
Part film noir, part new wave, part homage … this is a real gem, maybe even a masterpiece which swept away all before it with it's own inventive breathtaking genius.

BY DARRELL FINN