Critics reviews

I was about fifteen or sixteen, and up until then I’d only seen commercial movies, so this really overwhelmed me and rocked my world. For the first time, my idea of what a film could be was broadened, and in my mind it took on so many different nuances.

Each character drains the romance from the other's point of view, making Breathless a singularly penetrating film noir that still jars after more than 50 years.

This breaking of the fourth wall extends to the film's final shot... The Bogie impersonation has passed from Michel to Patricia – it's cinema as viral infection. The gun shot that ends one picture acts as the starting shot for a new era. Godard himself saw his film as the final movement in a reinvigoration of French cinema; he declared: "A certain kind of cinema has just drawn to a close, maybe ended, so let's add the finishing touches, let's show that anything goes.

Godard's bold, cinematic shake-up wouldn't have the impact it did were it not for the cool confidence of Belmondo, who in staring down a poster of Bogart, inspires a whole history of postmodernism in movies.

One of Godard's (and our culture's) reflex images, so acute and apt that it remains sharply in focus for anyone who cares about the cinema, about the West in 1960, or about ourselves at the onset of the twenty-first century.

The film's stylistic breakthroughs have been so influential as to seem familiar now--particularly the newsreel-like cinematography and randomly employed jump-cuts (which Jonathan Rosenbaum has compared to "a needle skipping gaily across a record"). But beneath the carefree attitude is a rich poetic sensibility, arguably the one consistent trait throughout Godard's varied body of work.

With its jazzy, staccato rhythms and endless referencing of other films and filmmakers, Breathless makes alienation look like it was a lot more fun in 1960 than in the ponderous gravitas or ante-upping brutality of indie film today. The jaunty insouciance with which these two beauties approach and avoid, rescue and betray, carry their lengthy existential chats from death to ashtrays to Rolls-Royces without blinking an eye, remains as intoxicating as ever—for moviegoers of a certain age.

It wasn't until I sat down and re-watched Breathless—in a beautifully restored new 35mm print—that I remembered that its sleek surface charms, while hardly insubstantial, don't really account for why we keep watching it so many decades later. Rather, what remains most striking, and most moving, about Breathless is its sophisticated yet largely guileless faith in the filmic medium, a cinephilia untainted by smugness or cynicism.

It's a fast-running current that draws you in and carries you along with it. This is a movie that moves. Raoul Coutard's camera circles and soars, and Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo), the gangster whose killing of a cop at the start of the film has him on the run, seems to be in perpetual motion... Watching this glamorous pair, the prickly pragmatist and the narcissistic romantic, parry and thrust their way through some of the most beautiful parts of Paris is pure cinematic pleasure.

I don't so much recollect my first reactions to Breathless as find myself involuntarily possessed by them, or rather inextricably embedded in them. I cannot report on Breathless as it looks now because it will never lose for me its original mesmeric fascination.

Breathless was a one-off, but never arbitrary. And unlike those other monolithic, epochal films that changed the face of narrative cinema (Citizen Kane, 2001, Pulp Fiction), Godard's film still feels slippery, and so self-consciously clever that we feel like we may never fully grasp its intentions. It's fun, but never easy, even if it seems like Godard's most accessible. All filmmakers should strive for such simultaneous clarity and obfuscation.

...It is in many ways one of the movies' most compelling invitations to dreaming... Generally considered the seminal moment of the nouvelle vague,Breathless is genuinely postmodern in that it breaks most traditional rules of storytelling, performance and even form, sprinting from one point to another by cutting into scenes to eliminate pauses and anything else non-essential from the largely improvised action.