Breathless (1960)
The next French New Wave film I watched was Breathless (1960), directed by Jean-Luc Godard and written by François Truffaut.
The next French New Wave film I watched was Breathless (1960), directed by Jean-Luc Godard and written by François Truffaut. Godard is a legendary French-Swiss director with 129 credits listed on IMDb, while Truffaut wrote and directed dozens of his own movies, notably The 400 Blows (1959), which I’ll review soon. Breathless depicts a love affair between a car thief (Michel, played by Jean-Paul Belmondo) and an American journalist (Patricia, played by Jean Seberg), whose feelings toward each other are debatable. I’m not sure if I liked this film in as much as it was originally presented to me in college as an important movie from this era. What makes it a French New Wave movie are the jump cuts (parts of scenes are omitted instead of being shown in their entirety), the intimate topics discussed (the scene above takes place in Patricia’s hotel room), and how the camera redirects focus away from the main characters to conversations nearby. It also feels like a filmmaker’s film in how it pays homage to Hollywood (Humphrey Bogart is shown in one scene) and Westerns specifically (I will not reveal the ending, but it’s very much written in the same vein as an old cowboy flick). Watch Breathless on HBO Max and Kanopy.