Review: 'Breathless' is back, a fascinating landmark of the French New Wave that feels as fresh as ever

How can a movie be more than 60 years old and look so fresh, cool and timely? See "Breathless," Jean-Luc Godard's landmark 1960 debut now refreshed in a new print, and you'll be asking the same thing.

"Breathless" -- along with François Truffaut's "The 400 Blows" and Alain Resnais' "Hiroshima Mon Amour" -- heralded the start of the French New Wave, which shook up stodgy European filmmaking (and later the U.S. movie world) with bold visuals, taboo-shattering subject matter and rule-breaking camera movement and editing.

Godard centers "Breathless" (the French title, "Á bout de souffle," means literally "at breath's end") around Michel Poiccard (played by the hunky Jean-Paul Belmondo), a none-too-bright petty criminal who's obsessed with Humphrey Bogart and other American gangster icons. He graduates to the top of the most-wanted list when he steals a car in Marseilles and kills a motorcycle cop.

Michel drives to Paris with two goals: Retrieve money owed him by a gangster, and hook up again with Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg), an American journalism student he romanced a few weeks earlier in Nice. He finds her in the street as she's selling newspapers and tries to persuade her to run away with him to Italy — not knowing that he's on the run from the law.

In "Breathless," Godard revealed the obsession with Hollywood iconography — the cigarette dangling from Bogie's lips, the fast cars and cool guns — that fueled the French New Wave. In transferring those icons, Godard made some of his own, from Belmondo's smoldering stare to the alluring sight of the pixie-haired Seberg in her New York Herald Tribune T-shirt.

And while emulating Hollywood cool, Godard also invented a much-copied form of filmmaking. Relying on hand-held camerawork, shooting guerrilla style on the Paris streets, and moving the action with impatient jump-cuts, Godard rewrote the rules of cinema -- rules that sparked the visions of generations of maverick filmmakers.

Minus the French subtitles and the credits (what little there are, besides the title, a distribution visa number and a dedication to Monogram Pictures), you could thread "Breathless" through a projector during any given day of the Sundance Film Festival and half the audience would think it was the work of some new 20-something filmmaker — rather than a film made by a guy who's now in his 90s. Even now, with its rough-and-tumble feel, "Breathless" can still take your breath away.

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‘Breathless (Á bout de souffle)’

★★★★

Opens Friday, September 2, for a one-week run at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably PG-13 for sensuality, violence and language. Running time: 90 minutes; in French, with subtitles.

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This review originally appeared in The Salt Lake Tribune on November 11, 2010, to mark the film’s 50th anniversary.