Breathless

In anticipation of Richard Linklater’s extremely cool Nouvelle Vague (VIFF’s opening gala), this is an opportune moment to revisit Godard’s iconic debut feature, a criminal romance about a petty criminal (Jean-Paul Belmondo) on the lam with American in Paris Jean Seberg. Seberg was an American import, Otto Preminger’s Saint Joan, and hailed by the Cahiers du cinema critics as “the new Divinity of the cinema”. Belmondo was the son of a sculptor, Paul Belmondo, and exhibited a charismatic, casual, rough-hewn style that audiences loved. “I saw him as a kind of block that it was necessary to film to discover what lay behind,” said Godard. Hawking the Tribune on the Champs-Elysees proved a career high for her. Belmondo enjoyed a long mainstream career (including Borsalino with Alain Delon) interspersed with occasional new wave favours.

Writing about Hot Blood, of all things, in 1957, Godard said that “If cinema no longer existed, director Nicholas Ray alone gives the impression of being able to reinvent it, and what is more, of wanting to.” But in fact it was Godard who pulled off the reinvention. Breathless lives up to its name. It bursts with energy. It is radical for its bebop-style montage (including the pragmatic use of jumpcuts), its mixture of neo-realism, thriller elements and an almost anthropological fascination with its young lovers.