I forgot that I wrote a blurb for fucking Breathless until just now when I was scoping Cinefamily’s calendar and thought, “Hey, that writing seems familiar!” It already played, but it’s not like you needed me to tell you to go see Godard’s masterpiece. But anyway, here’s the blurb.
Godard once said that “all you need for a movie is a gun and a girl” — and that’s about all he had at his disposal when he changed the course of cinema with this raw, impossibly stylish and eternally youthful 1960 debut. The girl, of course, was alluring American actress Jean Seberg as a brainy romantic expat, and the gun was held by Jean-Paul Belmondo, oozing the absurdist cocky machismo of an art-school young turk in his role as a small time crook. Armed with a handheld camera and chaotic hand-scrawled script notes written the night before to maximize spontaneity, Godard attacked the streets of Paris guerilla-style, bottling the energy of the entire city on film before employing some of the boldest editing yet seen, whittling a radiant pop art masterpiece out a B-movie crime story’s skeleton. Like its onscreen couple, Breathless itself is an eager and wildly entertaining Franco-American romance: a love letter to American cinema that’s at once dizzying, conflicted, and eloquent.
