“Gotta make tracks, Max!” Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo) yells as he tears off in a hotwired car toward his own doom at the start of Breathless. He kills a cop and flees to Paris, where he tries to convince American newspaper girl Patricia (Jean Seberg) to run away with him. Drawing on American film noir a la Nicholas Ray or Sam Fuller, Godard drops a flash bomb with his brash, confident debut. His two leads strolling down the Champs Elysees is perhaps the most iconic image of the French New Wave.
“Modern movies begin here, with Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless in 1960. No debut film since Citizen Kane in 1942 has been as influential.” – Roger Ebert
“This movie liberated the cinema – the stories you could tell and the ways you could tell them – as clearly and cleanly as Picasso freed painting and the Sex Pistols rebooted rock.” – Ty Burr, Boston Globe
“Breathless is a pop artifact and a daring work of art, made at a time when the two possibilities existed in a state of almost perfect convergence. That is the source of its uniqueness. Much as it may have influenced what was to come later, there is still nothing else quite like it. Its sexual candor is still surprising, and even now, at 50, it is still cool, still new, still – after all this time! – a bulletin from the future of movies.” – A.O. Scott, The New York Times
