Breathless Details

The day the New Wave began

Jean-Luc Godard's first feature film, shot on a tiny budget, makes a virtue of necessity.

The hand-held camera and monochrome film stock were all the crew could afford, and the on-street locations, the scruffy apartments, the cafes, and the car interiors all look real because they were. But between them these images created the nouvelle vague.

"Breathless" made Jean-Paul Belmondo into a star. The ruthless, shiftless young criminal, who is nevertheless a glamorous anti-hero, has become a movie cliché, but here Belmondo is doing it perhaps better than anyone else since.

However, the real star of this movie is Jean Seberg as Patricia, the American ex-pat who is Belmondo's lover. She is intelligent, moral and independent, but she is also inexplicably under the misogynistic spell of her untrustworthy and jealous lover. It's Seberg's finest role and it gets better as the film proceeds.

The DVD has some interesting extras, including a short film Godard made just before the main feature, "Charlotte et son Jules". This was an early try-out for Belmondo's garrulous male chauvinist pig, the victim this time being the endearing Anne Collette. It's a gem, and so is the main movie.

Great films don't show their age. Instead they define the age in which they were made. This is Paris in 1960, and cinema was about to change.

[Highly rated reviewer]

Passion

Perhaps this is lesser-known Godard, and from the period where his works had long since become lost in their own obscurity, but fans of the man should find much to stimulate them here. It will help if you know that this film was supposed to be made in Hollywood, but Coppola's Zoetrope studio went bust and Godard argued with all his collaborators, so he returned to his old French crew and made this rather corruscating attack on the way movies tend to idealise and freeze events, when the real poetry of life, real events are actually happening all around us. So while Jerzy is trying to recreate old master paintings in his studio, and everyone is banging on at him to provide a 'plot', there are affairs and strikes and madness going on outside. Passion is not to be found at the movies anymore.