À bout de souffle 1960

À bout de souffle (Breathless) is Jean-Luc Godard's first feature, released in March 1960. Its story is a cheap crime plot: Michel Poiccard, a petty car thief who models himself on Humphrey Bogart, kills a policeman on a country road and hides out in Paris with Patricia, an American student who sells the New York Herald Tribune on the Champs-Élysées. He wants her to run away to Italy with him. She is not sure she loves him. What made the film famous is the way it was made: shot in the street with a hand-held camera, on a tiny budget, with dialogue written day by day and editing full of jump cuts that skip from one moment to the next. It made Jean-Paul Belmondo a star and is still the film that most people picture when they hear the words "French New Wave".

A thief and an American girl

The film opens with Michel stealing a car in Marseille and driving towards Paris, talking to the camera. When a motorcycle policeman follows him, he shoots him with a gun he finds in the glove box. In Paris he needs money owed to him by an associate, and he looks for Patricia, played by Jean Seberg, whom he met a few weeks earlier on the Riviera.

The longest sequence of the film takes place in her small hotel room. For almost half an hour they talk, smoke, flirt, argue about Faulkner and pull faces in the mirror while the police close in outside. It is a love scene, an interview and a comedy at once.

How it was made

The story idea came from François Truffaut, based on a newspaper item; Claude Chabrol acted as technical adviser. The producer Georges de Beauregard agreed to a budget far below that of a normal French film.

Raoul Coutard shot with a light camera, often hand-held, using fast film stock so that he could work with natural light. For a tracking shot along the Champs-Élysées, Godard pushed Coutard around in a postal delivery cart. Many scenes were shot without permission, with passers-by looking at the camera.

The jump cuts began partly as a practical solution. The first cut was too long, and instead of removing whole scenes Godard cut out pieces inside them. In the car scene with Patricia, the shots of her hair jump forward while Michel's voice continues. What was a mistake by the rules of classical editing became a new rhythm.

Belmondo and Seberg

Belmondo, with his broken nose and cigarette always on his lip, plays Michel as a cartoon of a gangster who is also oddly touching. Seberg was already known from Otto Preminger's Saint Joan and Bonjour Tristesse; with her cropped hair and striped T-shirt she became a style icon. Her flat American accent in French is part of the character's distance.

Look out for Jean-Pierre Melville in a cameo as a novelist being interviewed at Orly airport. Asked what his ambition is, he says: to become immortal, and then die.

Seen today

The film's casual attitude towards Patricia and the way it treats a murder as a style gesture can feel cold now. Godard was more interested in cinema itself than in his characters, and you can feel the young critic showing off. But it is short, fast, funny, and its freedom is still contagious.

Godard went on to make Le Mépris three years later, a film in colour and widescreen about filmmaking itself. Truffaut's Les Quatre Cents Coups came out the year before. For more crime films, see the best French thrillers; for the rest of the decade, the best French films of the 1960s.