Breathless is the less-than-perfect translation of the French title of Jean Luc-Godard’s 1960 explosion into the world of international cinema: À Bout de Souffle. Along with Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, which was released a little under a year before, À Bout de Souffle marked the beginning of the French New Wave and epitomizes its style.
Previous to directing, both Truffaut and Godard had established reputations as critics who challenged many of the traditional and conventional notions of what made a film great. Rejecting the glossy, big-budget, highly-polished sheen of typical Hollywood films, Godard instead argued that the truly creative artists working within the Hollywood system were those ignored by critics and the studio heads alike. Instead of the high-minded “message movies” with bloated production values, Godard envisioned a filmmaking that would allow room for the filmmaker's personal vision on a smaller scale. He and Truffaut both valued this auteur structure, in which the film became a manifestation of the filmmaker's imagination.
This is especially true of Breathless, a film that is somewhat at odds with conventional narrative expectations and takes many stylistic liberties in order to make vivid the story of the wayward Michel and his depressed lover, Patricia. The structure of the narrative—a man, some kind of amateur gangster on the run from the cops, engaged in a sordid affair with an American aspiring writer—drifts along with an almost dreamlike quality, as psychological narratives are layered on top of plots, which are in turn peppered with philosophical and existential questions.
This more fragmentary and imaginative structure is complemented by the film's technical elements as well. Breathless uses jump cuts, whimsically-timed closeups, character asides, and breaking the eyeline to lend the narrative a certain surreal and psychological quality. Standard editing cues are often absent, replaced with a singular and specific filmmaking language that underlines the poetry of the characters' predicaments and aligns the viewer with their plights.
Breathless epitomizes many qualities that are now considered emblematic of the French New Wave. When one discusses this period of film history, Breathless is often at the center of conversation. It made a break from standard filmmaking, and its influence can still be seen in film to this day.
