5/5 The `New Wave' begins with this startling cinematic achievement...
  by Andrew Ellington (Mulholland Drive)
Jean-Luc Godard has been credited with revitalizing cinema in the early 60's with his interesting and unique style of filmmaking, a style that has bleed over into even modern cinema and continues to influence and inspire. To say that Jean-Luc Godard is one of the greatest directors of all time (in company with Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick and Ingmar Bergman) is perhaps too simple. The fact remains that Godard isn't simply one of the best, he's one of the most important. `A Bout de Souffle' (better known as `Breathless') is a sublime example of why he is so important. With his debut feature film he stunned audiences and critics alike by breathing a breath of fresh air into cinema and creating something new and intriguing and completely entertaining.

`A Bout de Souffle' is one of those films you have to be wary about `over-praising' because once you `get' it you totally fall head over heals for it, but until you `get' it you may find yourself baffled at all the praise. That was me upon my initial viewing. I was about halfway into the film and I was stumped as to why this movie was so well loved. Sure, it was stylistically exuberating and blatantly original in construction, but as far as being a great `movie', well, I just wasn't `feeling' it in that way. The third act though is a huge wallop to the viewer and completely changed my thinking on the entire film. In fact, upon my second viewing I was able to spot things throughout the films progression that only added to my admiration for it, and now I am completely and utterly in love with the film; so much so that I consider it one of the best ever made.

So, I don't want to raise your expectations so much that you become dumbfounded in the films first and second act. Please, realize that my praise belongs to the film in its entirety, and entirety that cannot be fully appreciated until the third act is through. You really need to judge the film on your second viewing, for it is only after you have put all the pieces together that you can really enjoy the film from start to finish.

The film is part crime noir, part romantic thriller. It centers around a thug named Michel who is on the run after killing a police officer. He hides out in his American girlfriend's apartment. The film sports a neurotic narrative that keeps the audience glued as Michel and Patricia (the girlfriend) go through their day as normal people in abnormal circumstances. The performances are fresh and believable, and the dialog (a lot of which was adlibbed) feels perfect for the situation. Godard brings a lot of his love for film into his construction of `A Bout de Souffle', a film that can be seen as an ode to the great film noirs that came before it. What is remarkable is that, but making this film completely his own, Godard created an ode that is superior to the films he was praising.

During a press conference with an author, Jean Seberg's character Patricia asks the author "what is your greatest ambition in life" to which he responds, after much thought, "to become immortal and then to die". The significance of this statement is seen, not only in this film, but in the idea that art makes the artist immortal. Godard has become immortal. In the context of the film though, the immortality comes from love. When one has become truly loved then they are in essence `immortal'.

The question raised at the end of this film is, `was Michel immortal?'

Through Godard's impressive way of telling a story within a story one really has to watch this film a few times to answer that question. The outcome with each viewing may be different than the last, and the fact that Godard keeps the answer an ambiguity is to the films advantage. Did Patricia really love Michel? Was her emotional reaction to the films conclusion all just an act? Piecing together Godard's point of view may reveal an answer you least expect, which makes this film all the more captivating. The films production notes mention that Patricia commits the ultimate act of betrayal; but exactly what that act is, is up to the audience to decide.

4/5 Dated but decent
  by One-Line Film Reviews (Easton, MD)
The Bottom Line:

Breathless reminds me of the Blair Witch Project (bet I'm the first person to ever say that) in that looking back it's hard to see what all the fuss was about--Breathless was extraordinarily novel for its time but now it's a far less compelling motion picture, so if you sit down to watch it you might find a find far less masterful than you were lead to believe.

3/4

4/5 Most definitely fun, but a prescurser of what was to come
  by Robert J. Crawford (Balmette Talloires, France)
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.

4/5 Godard's Jazzy Groundbreaker Still Packs a Punch and Gets the Luxuriant Criterion Treatment
  by Ed Uyeshima (San Francisco, CA USA)
At the forefront of the French New Wave along with François Truffaut (The 400 Blows), Alain Resnais (Hiroshima Mon Amour), and Louis Malle (Elevator to the Gallows), Jean-Luc Godard broke all the rules in his 1960 directorial debut with a story borne out of American B-movie conventions but revitalized by his free-form narrative, hand-held camerawork (by Raoul Coutard) and jazz-infused editing style. On the surface, it seems like a standard young couple-on-the-run adventure, but Godard upends the predictability of the situation with a fresh, documentary-style perspective that emphasizes youthful impulses over morality lessons. Some of its fresh, brazen novelty has worn off over the years, but there is no denying its propulsive energy.

The plot is deceptively simple. Michel Poiccard is a young, small-time criminal with a Bogart fixation, living for the moment and taking what he needs with no consideration for the possible consequences. His one obsession is Patricia Franchini, a pixyish New Yorker who lives in Paris and works part-time for the New York Herald Tribune. Michel steals a car in Marseilles and drives to Paris to see her again. On the way, however, he shoots a motorcycle cop with a gun found in the glove compartment of the stolen car. As the police close in on Michel, he holes up in Patricia's apartment and tries to convince her to run away with him to Rome. Godard wrote the script based on a story by Truffaut, and the plot emphasis is placed squarely on the dynamic between Michel and Patricia, especially in a lengthy dialogue scene in her apartment. The thriller aspects seem secondary until the last half-hour and the memorably bitter ending.

In his breakthrough role, Jean-Paul Belmondo captures Michel's surly, amoral nature with a certain magnetic quality that announces his arrival. As the fashionably enigmatic Patricia, Jean Seberg was just 21 but had already been burned by Hollywood thanks to her mechanical performances in two Otto Preminger films, Saint Joan and Bonjour Tristesse. She still strikes me a blank slate here, but it seems to work for the story because the viewer is left wondering what motivates her devotion to him and her final act of absolution. The two-disc 2007 Criterion Collection DVD set is as impressive as expected for the film's aficionados. Beyond a fairly pristine print of the movie, Disc One includes the original French trailer and 27-minutes worth of vintage interviews with Godard, Belmondo, Seberg, and director Jean-Pierre Melville (who has a memorable cameo as a pretentious author. Surprisingly, there is no commentary track from a film scholar, the usual supplement for special Criterion releases.

Disc Two has the lion's share of the extras. There are recent interviews with Coutard and assistant director Pierre Rissient, as well as a ten-minute interview with documentary filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker and his brief experience working with Godard. Seberg gets special attention in an eighteen-minute film essay that covers her tragic life and career, and another essay, "Breathless as Criticism" has Chicago Reader film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum explaining the significance of the film for a new generation. There is a 78-minute documentary from 1993, "Chambre 12, Hotel de Suede" that traces the original film locales. Interviews with Belmondo, Coutard, and technical adviser Claude Chabrol are also included. Finally, there is a twelve-minute comedy short from 1959, "Charlotte et son Jules" co-starring Godard and Belmondo. A comprehensive eighty-page booklet accompanies the set.

2/5 One of the most overrated films ever
  by
The fact that an artist writes boringly to convey boredom, or childishly to convey puerility, has no effect on the resultant work not being boring nor puerile. Self-awareness of a flaw does not alleviate the flaw. For this to not be true intent in art would have to matter, meaning that all art would necessarily have to be accompanied by a detailed explanation of itself and its conception by the artists, which would therefore render the idea of the art as its own best explanation worthless. Naturally, this would rent the very essence of the artwork.
Yet, in recent decades there has been the reflexive notion, usually tossed about by bad artists, that intent is almost all in art, or even that it supersedes actual accomplishment. This results in defenses of bad works of art that inevitably rely on defending the art's intent, not its success in following through on that intent. This has been championed by the `first thought, best thought' Beatniks of the 1950s, modern Postmodernist thought, and in the 1960s New Wave of French cinema. One of the leading lights of that `movement' was Jean-Luc Godard, whose first film, Breathless (A Bout de Souffle [literally, The End Of Breath]- 1960), made him a directing superstar. While one cannot dispute the historic import of such a film, historic import has never been equivalent to artistic excellence, and Breathless is a horribly dated film. Yet, even were it not so dated, it would still be a bad film because it is so self-conscious, so poorly written, and so poorly acted, that I thought I was watching a Roger Corman cheapo horror film. Let me state, however, that there is more `art' in your typical Corman piece from that era, say The Last Woman On Earth, because its commentary on the state of filmmaking and art was more subtle, if often unintentional. Godard, by contrast, is so garishly dying to show his audience how hip and intellectual he is that he somehow forgot to put any of that, nor substance, into his film.
He attempts to capture `reality' on film without realizing that anything filmed becomes unreal, or irreal, as opposed to surreal. Thus, the art of film, or any art, can NEVER be real, and to convey reality most aptly, it needs to be most affected. Godard, by shooting his film with handheld camera, as Parisians gawk at the filming in process, thus makes the most artificial of films, even as he tries to show the most boring aspects of life, glossing over crimes and `deep' moments that other films contain, to show the dull times. He thus gets the two worst aspects of film- the `artificiality' of cinema verité and the reality of dull life, rather than the two best: the `reality' of film as artifice and the artifice of poetically chosen reality.
What little story the tale has starts abruptly. It is an odd start, but not unlike many bad 1950s kids' television shows, nor contemporaneous B horror films like Carnival Of Souls. A hood named Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo) steals a car in Marseilles and drives to Paris. On his way there, he is stopped for speeding and shoots a policeman. This goes by so quickly and without explanation that the viewer cannot empathize with him. Once in Paris, he needs to get money from a friend and flirts with an American female student named Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg) he has had an affair with. They wax in and out of fancy with one another, and on it goes.... Across the pond, in America, at the time Breathless was being filmed, John Cassavetes was also making his feature film debut as a director, with Shadows, and although there is an amateurish quality to some aspects of that film, and it was not nearly praised as highly as Breathless, it was much less amateurish than this film, and holds up far better today, as a `realist' piece of filmmaking. Breathless, by contrast, can only be defended as a historical curio, not artistically on its own merits, which is exactly what virtually all online essays that defend it do. Cassavetes' first film, by contrast, stands alone, and his usage of overlapping and realistic dialogue, not culled nor self-consciously quoted from Hollywood film dialogue, is far better than Godard's, which was stillborn when fellow auteur Francois Truffaut abandoned the screenplay to Godard. Godard captured none of the film noir joie de vivre that he hoped to, while Cassavetes brought American real life dialogue to the screen at the same time. Godard's characters never utter a believable line of dialogue. It is all a put on, for Michel is no more a gangster type than Belmondo- the actor who plays him, is, nor even Humphrey Bogart- the actor Michel imitates throughout the film. This is seen by apologists, however, as the film's style, although this so-called style is really stylelessness, and that is no more artistic than claiming formless Dave Eggersian puerility as a writing style....Later filmmakers went leagues beyond Godard, and actually demanded their innovations serve the film's tale, rather than merely being a piece of self-indulgence a haphazard and wan tale is draped over. With no good execution, no real depth, nor character development, what was intended as satire becomes, instead, awkward and obvious imitation, not witty enough for comedy, and more resembling something like film noir lite.
John Cassavetes was doing similar things in America, but doing them much better, for his filmic improvisations never came across as `improvisations', but `reality'. In short, for all the claims to the contrary, this film, at least, does not reveal a unique innovator in his art form, but an old Romantic masquing as a hipster, and wildly cobbling together a Frankensteinian mess. In America we call that person a poseur. In France they apparently call them geniuses....just like, um, Jerry Lewis.