Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960): France

Reviewed by Kathleen Amboy.  Viewed on DVD.

  Chain-smoking Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo), models himself after  his screen idol Humphrey Bogart, with the constant and too obvious rubbing of his mouth and the ever present Fedora hat.

Poiccard is a small time crook who steals cars for a living, and is on the lam from the police once he shoots a motorcycle cop.  He is attracted to the fresh young Sorbonne student, Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg), and desperately wants her to join him on a trip to Nice.

Franchini, an American journalist student, sells the New York Herald Tribune on the streets of Paris and has had a previous fling with Poiccard.  She hesitantly agrees, but when she later discovers his picture in the papers, she abruptly rolls on him to the detectives that are tracking him.

Although Michel is always on the make for Patricia, he proves a deeper love for her when he decides not to run, even when it becomes clear that Patricia is the one that has turned him in to the cops.

As the cops are closing in, Michel is offered a gun from a passing friend for which he declines, but is shot down in the street anyway.  And there the film ends just as abruptly as it began.

Breathless was released on the heels of Truffaut’s 400 Blows and in fact the original story was written by Francois Truffaut, making it one of the original hits in the French New Wave.

Godard shot his film with a single hand-held camera, lending a documentary style effect to the film.  It is simplistic, yet sweet and introduces a voyeuristic approach for the audience.