Jean-Luc Godard's À bout de souffle | Breathless (1960)

Is 'Breathless' the best translation of 'À bout de souffle'? I prefer 'Out of Breath', but there we have it. Whatever the title, this is Jean-Luc Godard's first film, and quite rightly seen as immensely important as an innovation not only in the history of French cinema but the history of cinema tout court. But why?

OK, jump shots, hand-held cameras, lack of studio, often lack of polish or editing, experimentation, etc, but there's more than that here: there's also a question of content. 

This is 1960 and the USA is still living in puritanism. Now, the nouvelle vague directors were influenced by American cinema: a relatively new country culturally versus an old continent: but that new (half-)continent was in part hidebound by minorities who had escaped from persecutions by the old world, so conflict was inevitable. However new and exciting it was, wasn't Hollywood and all that came from it restrained in so many ways? European (especially French) cinema had learned so much from American cinema, but French cinema was opening up a new world to America. He looks in the mirror and sees himself as a kind of Humphrey Bogart, but the film gave birth not just to the obvious Bonnie and Clyde, but to many other American actors such as Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Sean Penn, Jack Nicholson, etc. Thelma and Louise?

 À bout de souffle was, contrary to what title anyone chooses for translation, a breath of life into cinema. Here we have the main character Michel Poiccard (a young Jean-Paul Belmondo), an amoral gangster, almost a psychopath, someone only out for his own end (financially or sexually), a twenty-something who is on the run from something (maybe himself), who casually steals a car (as he casually steals more cars and money too), dreams of escaping to Italy but must first leave Marseilles and get money that Antonio owes him (although we don't know why: who cares?) 

So he takes off for Paris, driving dangerously and is chased by the police, kills one of them, makes it to Paris, robs one of his girlfriends and hides out in the cramped flat another one's living in: Patricia (Jean Seberg), who may be pregnant by him and isn't sure she's in love with him. But it's evident that she's fascinated by him, thrilled by his gangster reality, and she's in effect just as amoral as him. The sketch of Michel meeting her again on the Champs-Élysées, where she's selling the New York Herald Tribune while waiting to go to the Sorbonne, is one of the classic moments of movie history.

But as he waits for the money he's owed to come in, they hide from the police as they move in closer and closer, until Patricia denounces him because she's decided she doesn't love him, or does she? In the street scene as she hears his dying words, with the faux-naïf voice she's used several times previously, she (rather unconvincingly) asks the cops standing over the body what dégueulasse means.

À bout de souffle celebrates its 60th anniversary next year, and apart from the clothing and the cars still look as fresh as when it was first made. It features Jean-Luc Godard himself as the grass, Truffaut was co-scriptwriter, Chabrol was on the technical team, and Jean-Pierre Melville appears in a cameo. Unforgettable, and this film can be watched endlessly.