Breathless - Criterion Collection
by Jean-Luc Godard
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Claude Mansard, Henri-Jacques Huet, Jean Domarchi, Roger Hanin, Van DoudeDirector: Jean-Luc Godard
Brand: Image Entertainment
Cinematographer: Raoul Coutard
Composer: Martial Solal
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language); French (Original Language); English (Subtitled)
Format: Color, DVD-Video, Full Screen, NTSC, Subtitled
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 90 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2007-10-23
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Criterion Collection
Movie Reviews of Breathless - Criterion Collection
Movie Review: Most definitely fun, but a prescurser of what was to come
Summary: 4 Stars
Viewing this is surprisingly fresh: all of the protagonists are evident mediocrities and even rather silly. While they use fashionable vocabulary and "all the right moves", they are basically stupid and headed nowhere.
So you get a petty thief, forced to act at extremes and hidden in Paris to get money owed to him, so that he can escape to Italy. He has a string of GFs to exploit, and seeks to find one willing to help him in Paris, after another has apparently given him up to the cops after helping him to steal a car in Marseilles (the pathetic motive of all his crimes). He finds one, a lovely American would-be journalist (Seeburg, who was to make a career in Paris, marry novelist Roman Gary and later commit suicide), whom he uses in the crudest self-serving manner. She obliges, to a point, for unbelievably laughable reasons that are surely meant as satire in her stilted dialogue.
The ending, nonetheless, is anything but expected, which in so many ways is the essence of New Wave realism. I hugely enjoed watching this unfold, even though I had seen this when I first came to Paris. I think it is a classic, though it has aged only medium well.
Recommended. Goddard is worth the effort, and the acting is good, however insipid the characters are by design. It is fun, you see Paris at the beginning of the 1960s, and the ironies - including the unbelievably stale interview by Seeburg character, with a writer at the airport, made while she was harboring an evil fugitive - are well worth the price of admission. But far better was yet to come in subsequent films.
Summary of Breathless - Criterion Collection
There was before Breathless, and there was after Breathless. With its lack of polish, surplus of attitude, crackling personalities of rising stars Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, and anything-goes crime narrative, Jean-Luc Godard's debut fashioned a simultaneous homage to and critique of the American film genres that influenced and rocked him as a film writer for Cahiers du cinema. Jazzy, free-form, and sexy, Breathless (A bout de souffle) helped launch the French new wave and ensured cinema would never be the same.The movie that heralded the French New Wave movement, this lean and exciting 1959 film directed by Jean-Luc Godard (A Woman Is a Woman, Weekend) broke new ground not only in its unorthodox use of editing and hand-held photography, but in its unflinching and nonjudgmental portrayal of amoral youth. Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg play two young lovers on the run from the law after Belmondo kills a cop and steals a car. Soon they are on an odyssey through the streets of Paris searching for some money he is owed so that he and his American girlfriend can escape to Italy. As a chase picture it features some startling photography on the streets of Paris, but as a romance it defies expectations, existing as part tragedy and part Bonnie and Clyde crime movie. The result is a wholly original film experience. Inspiring not only a remake starring Richard Gere but numerous films and television series, Breathless is an essential part of motion picture history. --Robert Lane
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