A BOUT DE SOUFFLE (BREATHLESS) (France 1959) ****
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard

The coolest film in its genre!  Nouvelle Vague director Godard’s first and most memorable film sees a petty thief Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo) find romance which is literally, the death of him.

As Michel hero-worships Humphrey Bogart, barely uttering his name as he stand beside the movie poster of THE HARDER THEY FALL, Godard’s protagonist models his every mover over the Bogart character.  Godard fashions a super-cool character out of what basically is quite a nasty crook.  Michel steals money from his girlfriends and various acquaintances, feeling no guilt or remorse.  He drives like a madman resulting in a cop pulling him over by a country road.  When he shoots the cop out of fear (as he describes it), he becomes wanted all over Paris.  He keeps this secret from his one true love, Patricia (Jean Seberg), an American student working for The Herald Tribune.  She eventually turns his whereabouts to the cops.

Restored in a print, BREATHLESS is crisp, gorgeous black and white.  As well known by now, Godard famous use of jump cuts and other editing techniques resulted in this film having a fresh, new outlook, even up to this present time.  Godard’s images are startling, even the sound crisp and inventive.  He has his actors accentuate their moves, like Michel folding a newspaper or closing an umbrella) and stride as if in a choreographed danced movements.  As a logo in a scene says: “Live dangerously to the very end,”, Godard is willing to try anything in this basic tale of a hoodlum who meets his end.

The climax with Patricia asking the cop the meaning of “dégueulasse”, the term Michel called her, just emphasizes her cluelessness in the act that she had just committed.  dégueulasseNothing short of Brilliant!