Summary: 10/10: a landmark film that invented the grammar contemporary cinema still speaks, and a sharper cultural critique than it's often given credit for.
Taken out of its historical moment, Jean-Luc Godard's first feature isn't necessarily thrilling. But for 1960, it was groundbreaking, a film that shattered conventions so thoroughly that its innovations are now invisible, absorbed completely into the language of contemporary cinema.
The technical aspects of Breathless remain totally relevant today: the revolutionary jump cuts, the handheld camera, the natural lighting, the guerrilla-style shooting without permits on Paris streets. Godard, working with cinematographer Raoul Coutard on a budget under $50,000 and a crew of just two people, invented techniques that would define independent filmmaking for generations. The docudrama aesthetic, the deliberately jagged rhythm, the refusal to respect continuity editing rules - all of this feels commonplace now precisely because Breathless made it possible.
The narrative itself is decent, based on a story treatment by François Truffaut and Claude Chabrol that they handed to Godard when they decided not to make it themselves. Some read it as a love letter to Hollywood, an homage to American gangster films. But in the context of today, I interpret this film as a sarcastic comment on the bad boy films of the 1950s. Jean-Paul Belmondo really nailed the Bogart style, but crucially, without the underlying sensitivity of Bogart. Michel Poiccard performs masculinity, models himself consciously after movie stars, but there's nothing beneath the performance except emptiness and casual cruelty.
And I have a different interpretation of the apparent misogyny that most reviewers misread. Given the stereotypical male and female performances, Michel's narcissistic posturing, Patricia's inscrutability, it seems like Godard is holding up a mirror to that culture, exposing rather than celebrating it. Roland Barthes would write that "the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author," and perhaps this film proves his point; whether or not Godard consciously intended feminist critique, the narrative itself reveals the hollowness of performed masculinity and the toll it takes on women forced to navigate it. This reading makes the film prescient of the feminist awakening just beginning to stir: Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique would be published just three years later in 1963, giving voice to the discontent Breathless captures visually. Godard shows us toxic masculinity before we had the language for it, shows us a man performing cool while being fundamentally empty, shows us a woman who ultimately refuses to be complicit in his self-destruction.
Breathless remains essential viewing not because it still shocks (it doesn't), but because understanding film history requires understanding the moment when everything changed, when a young director with a handheld camera proved that you could make cinema outside the studio system, that formal experimentation and narrative could coexist, that revolution was possible with $50,000 and audacity.
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