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À Bout de Souffle
Breathless
By a Tether / Ausser Atem
France 1960
produced by Georges de Beauregard for Les Films Impéria, Société Nouvelle de Cinématographie (SNC)
directed by Jean-Luc Godard
starring Jean Seberg, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Daniel Boulanger, Henri-Jacques Huet, Roger Hanin, Van Doude, Claude Mansard, Liliane Dreyfus (as Liliane David), Michel Fabre, Jean-Pierre Melville, Jean-Luc Godard, Richard Balducci, André S. Labarthe, François Moreuil, Liliane Robin, Gérard Brach, Philippe de Broca, José Bénazéraf
story by Francois Truffaut, screenplay by Jean-Luc Godard, music by Martial Solal
review by Mike Haberfelner
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Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is a small-fry crook, more dreaming of
making it big than having any real ambition, so he's stuck with
car-jacking. But when he finds himself cornered by a cop and more or less
accidently finds a handgun, he shoots the policeman ... and all of a
sudden finds himself on the run. He figures he'll hide out in Paris,
because Paris is a big enough city for him to get by undetected, and then
there's Antonio (Henri-Jacques Huet), who owes him enough money to leave
France for good altogether. And then there's also Patricia (Jean Seberg),
an American student who presently tries her hand at journalism who
Michel's madly in love with, even if he doesn't want to admit it to
himself. Patricia isn't half as sure about Michel - sure she feels drawn
to the man but turned away by his ultra-cool facade as well as his
impulsiveness. Plus, she's more of a free spirit than Michel would like
her to be. Anyways, when she learns he's in trouble, she sticks by him,
trying to make it work despite everything - and only when she comes to the
realization it's useless, she calls the police to snitch on him, in hope
that he would make his escape and leave her life for good. But as soon as
Michel's out of the house they're hiding out in, Antonio finally arrives
with the money and a handgun he forces onto Michel for self-defense ...
but when the police see the gun in his hand they just gun him down ... À
Bout de Souffle, seen by pretty much everybody as one of the key films
of the nouvelle vague, is actually indeed just that, as it's probably the
most revolutionary movie of the whole first wave of the nouvelle vague:
Deeply rooted in American film noir and gangster movies from the low
budget and of the 1940's (and thus the film is dedicated to B-film studio Monogram),
the film is a deconstruction of these movies of old at the same time: Shot
mostly guerrilla style in the streets of Paris, À Bout de Souffle
is nevertheless high on style, introduces random jumpcuts to narrative
filmmaking, is pop-culture savvy and with Jean-Paul Belmondo's Michel it
introduces a whole new kind of cool to cinema. And where other nouvelle
vague films and also Godard's later films often come across as
heavy-handed and/or brain-heavy, this one is fun, too, and possesses a
freshness to this day that many other films of the movement or the era
simply fail to convey. A must-see - but I guess everybody into film
knows this already.
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