Much of the time, if you profess to not like Breathless, a few New Wave devotees kind of sniff and intimate that, obviously, you didn't understand it.The hell I didn't. I was a teenager when the New Wave (Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol, Resnais, et. al) erupted. I saw ALL the key films when they came out. I tried very hard to be impressed, to string along with the huge number of critics who oohed with delight about cinema verité, hand-held cameras and improvised dialogue. But I couldn't do it then, and I still can't.I've watched Breathless twice completely and half a dozen times incompletely, over the past 50+ years. Yes, I understand it's a milestone. Yes, the film was a radical departure from standard studio-produced fare. Yes, it broke many so-called 'rules' of feature film-making.But sorry. All that doesn't make for a movie that's good. It bores. It rambles. It irritates by its ineptness. The images are very uneven in quality. The sound is pretty bad. In truth, one is expected, even urged, to admire it for its defects.Jean-Luc Godard (who is Swiss, though considered one of the pillars of the French New Wave) still makes movies today in 2018, at 87 years of age. Still does the festival circuit. And his movies are much improved technically. Almost all have a few pretty good scenes. But by and large, they're not meant to entertain. They're supposed to make you think. To react and reflect on the images and ideas he's throwing out at you.Now, back to Breathless (which a poor translation of the original French title 'A bout de souffle' that really means 'out of steam, out of energy, near the end of the line'.)If you've never seen it, by all means do so, simply for its reputation. And if like me, you were lucky enough to visit Paris in the 1950s and early 1960s, you'll be rewarded by once again seeing the city as it really was. Complete with a girl (the late, beloved Jean Seberg) on foot, hawking the late, beloved International Herald Tribune to American tourists. Just for those delights, my rating is 4/10 - about two points higher than it might otherwise receive from soft-hearted me.PS: If you find New Wave really hard to get through, stick with Truffaut. He rarely bores the way Godard and Resnais do. And how he evolved, year by year, into a master film craftsman is a story in itself.

I was filled with anxiety before beginning Breathless. As someone who is firmly entrenched in the Truffaut camp, #TruffautisLife after all, I was terrified that I would see what is often regarded as the director with whom Truffaut shared an open and intense parting of ways with and see the masterpiece I've always been told it was. Obviously, I know that appreciating a Godard film will do nothing to diminish my love for all things Truffaut, I'm just a loyalist and was worried how I'd feel enjoying a Godard film. Little did I know, I had nothing to worry about. I actively disliked Breathless, I may have even hated it. Jean-Luc Godard's 1960 film was important, I suppose, to the burgeoning French New Wave. I'm sure to subject myself to more Godard films in the future as my journey through cinema goes on, but Breathless did not live up to its reputation, for me.This is where the plot would go if there was one. Just kidding, sort of, there are happenings in Breathless but it is clear that there were not many rehearsals with a script taking place. I've read that Godard was rewriting the script each day, removing nearly all of the influence of Truffaut, who had given the film's story to Godard. Godard would then feed the lines to the actors from offset resulting in very little familiarity between the words of the script and the actors speaking them. Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo) a self-absorbed narcissistic sociopath, surely modeled after Jean-Luc Godard, steals a car then murders the police officer who chases after him. Needing a distraction and a place to hide out, Michel renews his relationship with Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg) an American in Paris studying journalism whom he met a few weeks prior. Despite their relationship being new and unestablished, Michel expects Patricia to accompany him on his getaway to Italy. Like a true narcissist, Michel is oblivious to the fact that his face is in all the papers and the police are closing in on him as he goes about his way collecting his money and planning his getaway. Focusing his attention on the American films that interest him and his American love interest, Michel ignores the fact that his very life is at stake.During the opening minutes of the film, Jean-Paul Belmondo breaks the fourth wall by looking at and speaking directly to the camera which is a device that almost always works for me. I thought that meant that I may be in for something good, but almost immediately after this scene ended, I nearly ran out of things to enjoy. The jump cuts were amazing and served the story well. I don't give Godard credit for inventing those cuts, as many do, however. An idol, Sergei Eisenstein used jump cuts in film--most memorably in depicting an explosion in The Battleship Potemkin. Georges Melies, whose work I have memorialized on my body also used jump cuts through most of his career in silent cinema. Despite the fact that Godard often gets credit for inventing the jump cut which he surely did not, I can't argue the fact that he used the technique effectively cementing certain aspects of The French New Wave. The music was phenomenal, so kudos to Godard for that. From his first film, however, one can see my biggest criticism of Godard. Godard has no problem excluding his audience. Just listening to Godard speak in interviews, it's clear to discern that he only expects the highest brow of intellectuals to enjoy his films. If an audience member doesn't fit into that category, he doesn't really care. He created terribly unlikeable characters engaging in a plot and a romance that no one could possibly care about, all the while carrying on pseudo-intellectual conversations grating on the last bit of patience I could muster. Obviously, Breathless works for almost everyone except me, but after seeing his debut feature, there's not much encouraging me to try more Godard films.

Breathless is right.I was enthralled the whole time.To understand this film, you have to understand its context. This is right up there with Citizen Kane and Star Wars as one of the most influential films ever made. It is the definite film of one of the definitive movements in cinema.France is the birthplace of cinemas. Many of the artform's oldest customs and traditions were developed there, but after a couple decades, the center of innovation shifted over to America, to the Cecil B. DeMille's and the D.W. Griffith's. Cinema was transformed into a form of high art. It could be analyzed and scrutinized. It could change lives and influence people.World War II changed this dynamic, as world-shattering events tend to do. Hollywood, of course, didn't disappear, but its Golden Age, which had already been in decline, disappeared completely. America had a crisis of identity in its film industry that didn't really resolve itself until the 60's and 70's. There were a lot of great films made in the 50's, but an overwhelming percentage of them came from out of the States. We had a few classics, a good deal of them either about Hollywood or by Alfred Hitchcock, but overall, the industry lacked both the glitz of the early days and the depth of recent times.When you think about the era of nostalgia, you probably either think about today or the 80's, but the 50's were like that too. Many of the biggest films took place in the 20's. We were relatively relaxed as a country. We had won a war, and we were in an unprecedented era of economic prosperity. We could afford to look backwards. France, however, could not.In case you slept through history in school, France was taken over by the Nazis in WWII, and it became one of the key theatres during the later part of the war. Hundreds of thousands of French died, and their country was in ruin. They had to rebuild their country. They could afford to be creative and innovative. In fact, they had to be.From that environment came the New Wave, an exciting, breezy, flippant new attitude toward filmmaking. The camera could travel freely. Jump cuts were used to clip through a scene. The traditional structure vanished, replaced with rambling conversations that were the direct precursors to Woody Allen movies. Films got more atmospheric and at the same time more sensual. There was a sense of highbrow swagger to them. It was as though film before the New Wave was a housewife, and film after the New Wave was an alluring mistress from a foreign land with a mysterious ill-gotten fortune.This style, of course, eventually made its way over to my country and became something else entirely, getting a lot darker in the process. But that's beside the point. Even if you're not a film historian, this is a breezy, energetic, clever, exceedingly entertaining flick. The acting is superb. The editing is sharp. The camera-work is exciting. The writing is thoroughly captivating. And yes, it is one of the Frenchiest films I have ever seen- a cultural icon, I could call it.So if you need a burst of roguish, revolutionary excitement in your life, check out Breathless.

Jean-Luc Godard is one of the French New Wave directors who, as critics in the 1950s, had been regular contributors to the influential publication "Cahiers Du Cinema". As a group, they were disenchanted with the output of the French film industry at that time and believed that by putting the director at the centre of the creative process and dispensing with traditional narrative conventions, a far more imaginative style of filmmaking could be achieved. In his first film, Godard sought to achieve this by a variety of means which included, borrowing from some earlier cinematic styles that he admired.In "Breathless" ("A Bout De Soufflé"), a simple film noir plot is presented in a style that owes much to the influence of the Italian Neo-Realists (e.g. filming on location, use of hand-held cameras and improvised dialogue). Additionally, by using unorthodox techniques such as "jump cuts" and getting characters to look directly into the camera and then injecting the action with great pace, the result is a movie that looks vibrant, spontaneous and highly energetic.At the time of its release, few could have imagined the impact that "Breathless" would have on filmmaking in general or the profound influence it would subsequently have on numerous directors such as John Cassavetes, Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino.Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is a small-time criminal who after stealing a car in Marseilles and killing a motorcycle cop, makes his way to Paris to collect some money that he's owed and reunite with one of his girlfriends called Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg). Patricia's an American student who has aspirations to become a journalist and earns some money by selling the "New York Herald-Tribune" on the Champs Elysees. Michel wants to escape to Italy as soon as he can collect his money and wants Patricia to go with him but she tells him that she can't leave Paris for financial reasons.Michel spends his time in Paris sharing Patricia's hotel room and the couple talk a great deal about life and love whilst Michel also tries relentlessly to seduce her. Despite the seriousness of his crimes, Michel seems very unconcerned about the situation he's in and if he does feel desperate, certainly hides it well beneath a façade of being super-cool. He's totally amoral and an inveterate thief but is also very preoccupied with trying to emulate the mannerisms of his hero, Humphrey Bogart.Patricia is a cold character who's fascinated by Michel's lifestyle but always remains emotionally detached even when they seem to be at their closest. Things get increasingly complicated for Michel as the police manhunt intensifies but eventually matters are brought to a head by a simple action that's incredibly casual, uncaring and self-serving.French New Wave directors Francois Truffaut, Claude Chabrol and Jean-Pierre Melville all contributed in different ways to the making of this movie and Alain Resnais' "Hiroshima Mon Amour" (1959) is just one of a whole collection of other films and filmmakers that are referenced. Amusingly, Michel's alias in the movie is Laszlo Kovacs and he also uses some of Humphrey Bogart's photos outside a cinema that's showing "The Harder They Fall" (1956) to perfect his attempt to look and act as much like Bogey as possible.In retrospect, it's no exaggeration to describe "Breathless" as a masterpiece because its exhilarating combination of originality, freshness and sheer enthusiasm was genuinely revolutionary when it was made and it became an incredibly rich source of inspiration to other filmmakers in the years that followed.