Breathless
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Movie Reviews of Breathless
Movie Review: The first of the New Wave, but not the best...
Summary: 4 Stars
All right - Breathless is an important film and I can see why. This is the film that gave birth to the French New Wave. Before this, films look like they were shot in a studio. This film made the gritty look of seventies filmmaking - and indeed, today's independent filmmaking - possible. This film has a guerrilla feel to it, which makes it seem very modern. Goddard films on actual locations with handheld cameras. The most obvious innovation is the deliberate use of "jump cuts", which goes against the traditional theory of "invisible edits." The story itself (by Francois Truffaut) is innovative - it foreshadows Quentin Tarantino with its non-moralistic account of a cold-blooded, Bogart-worshipping killer (wonderfully played by Jean-Paul Belmondo) and his crazy/beautiful American girlfriend.That having been said, the style of this film is really what is important. Looked at today, when its innovations have been absorbed into mainstream film, TV, and commercials, some of the flaws are more apparent. Especially towards the end of the film, when the story gets wackier and the style gets over-the-top, it became hard to restrain my Mystery Science Theater comments. That is the problem with being the first in anything - you go too far and you date yourself. Although Goddard started the Nouvelle Vague, I think that Truffaut - as evidenced by his script here - is the more important artist. This is the film that paves the way for better films like The 400 Blows. However, Breathless is still a good film and a must for any serious student of cinema. Although there are few extras on this DVD, the film looks great. For all its flaws, Breathless still has an air of authenticity that few films today can dream of.
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.
Movie Review: After seeing it a few times, I see it for what it is
Summary: 4 Stars
When I first saw Godard's Breathless, perhaps I had my expectactions high, or rather manipulated to be as such from reading other reviews, and I ended up thinking that while there was a flair for style and a rhythm that was a reminder of the jazzy feel in Cassavettes' Shadows, the characters, inparticular the lead, were too shallow, self-righteous, and all-too-vain for comfort - or perhaps too, well, French. On a few more tries of the "groundbreaker of the French new-wave" (which I believe was at it's absolute best in Truffaut's 400 Blows, accessible to a wider audience), I see that Godard, as much as he probably loves his characters, he despises them as well, in a sense. It could even be suggested that Godard sees himself in the lead Belmondo's role, and if that's the case then Godard is practicing the old self-reflection trick (though the story is loosely based on a newspaper article, scripted by Truffaut himself). For those that can take such filmmaking, this is the treat of the week. And for film buffs it should be seen at least once to get an idea where most "affluent" independent filmmakers get their edge, and indeed its rhythm will give inspiration to struggling filmmakers. I might even see it again in several months to remind myself how inspired the jump cuts were that Godard used. But, I certainly don't think that it's among the greatest films ever.
Movie Review: NOUVELLE NOT SO VAGUE
Summary: 4 Stars
Not exactly a thriller in the purest sense, film critic Jean-Luc Godard's first film "A Bout de Souffle" or "BREATHLESS" [...], originally released in 1961, not only ushered in the French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague) movement, but assured the director of a career and made an international star of Jean Paul Belmondo. Seeing this clean, full-frame digital transfer today, one is jolted with the timeless quality of this assured filmed experiment that daringly broke the rules and locked in a new cinematic language, or at least a new dialect. A hand-held camera more often than not on the move, a black and white documentary feel of realism and natural lighting and locations (not sets), jump cuts, improvisational shots and long, loose, naturalistic conversations (about things other than the so-called plot) between Belmondo and co-star Jean Seberg as amoral lovers on the run."Breathless" suffered an anemic remake in 1983 with Richard Gere as a kind of amphetamine-crazed nut case in the Belmondo role.
The original title more accurately translates as "Out of Breath." And it is an exhilarating film to re-experience, In form and theme, this is an existential, anti-film film with numerous, sly film references within the movie frame, in images, props and in the sometimes intentionally "big movie music" moments to punch up the irony of a scene. This is a great film.
Movie Review: A 5-star Film Historically; A 4-star Film in 2001
Summary: 4 Stars
When it was made, this was clearly a 5 star film that broke new ground for films of the future. Accordingly, everyone will tell you that you must see this film, that it is absolutely superb. I can't go that far. Filmmakers after Godard have taken everything they learned from this film and others that followed in the French New Wave and gone beyond it. I do think any serious film fan should see it though. You will love seeing the young Belmondo and Seberg as the amoral lovers in the late '50s-early '60s who are fatally flawed with a penchant for crime. There are also wonderful street scenes of Paris from that era. The film was remade in America in 1983 starring Richard Gere, roundly panned as unworthy of the original, and ignored by the public. I recommend that you see both films together. I think many will be startled to discover how really good the 1983 version is and that it more than holds up to the original.