À bout de souffle

Plot synopsis:
Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is a youthful criminal who is intrigued with the film persona of Humphrey Bogart. After stealing a car in Marseille, Michel shoots and kills a policeman who has followed him onto a country road. Penniless and on the run from the police, he turns to an American love interest Patricia (Jean Seberg), a student and aspiring journalist, who sells the New York Herald Tribune on the streets of Paris. The ambivalent Patricia unwittingly hides him in her apartment as he simultaneously tries to seduce her and call in a loan to fund their escape to Italy. Patricia says she is pregnant, probably with Michel's child. She learns that Michel is on the run when questioned by the police. Eventually she betrays him, but before the police arrive she tells Michel what she has done. He is somewhat resigned to a life in prison, and does not try to escape at first. The police shoot him in the street and, after a prolonged death run, he dies “à bout de souffle” (out of breath).
=== Closing dialogue ===
Michel's death scene is one of the most iconic scenes in the film, but the film's final lines of dialogue are the source of some confusion for English-speaking audiences. In some translations, it is unclear whether Michel is condemning Patricia, or alternatively condemning the world in general.
As Patricia and Detective Vital catch up with the dying Michel, they have the following dialogue:
MICHEL: C'est vraiment dégueulasse.
PATRICIA: Qu'est-ce qu'il a dit?
VITAL: Il a dit que vous êtes vraiment "une dégueulasse".
PATRICIA: Qu'est-ce que c'est "dégueulasse"?
In the English captioning of the 2001 Fox-Lorber Region One DVD, "dégueulasse" is translated as "scumbag", producing the following dialogue:
MICHEL: It's disgusting, really.
PATRICIA: What did he say?
VITAL: He said, "You're a real scumbag".
PATRICIA: What's a scumbag?
The 2007 Criterion Collection Region One DVD uses a less literal translation:
MICHEL: Makes me want to puke.
PATRICIA: What did he say?
VITAL: He said you make him want to puke.
PATRICIA: What's that mean, "puke"?
This translation also was used for the 2010 restoration print.

Tags: murder, cult, psychedelic, humor, romantic, entertaining

Review:
It's primarily because to appreciate Breathless, one has to view the movie from a historical context, which also requires studying of not only the French New Wave, but film theories as a whole, and the lives of those apart of the New Wave.
The 'Nouvelle Vague' came about from a group of like minded film critics writing for the Cahiers du Cinema.With his knowledge of classic film narrative and style Godard went out to create his own film in homage to, and also complete contradiction to, classic Hollywood film.The plot reads almost like a crime thriller typical of the 1930-40's.
Although watching the film closely is, as always, important in following the story A Bout de Souffle requires that little bit extra to define where the plot is being progressed and where Michel or Patricia are just flattering their egos or each other.All in all I personally think that A Bout de Souffle brought about a sense of realism not seen in Hollywood cinema before 1959 and even now.
Together with François Truffaut's "The 400 Blows" (one of my favorites), Jean-Luc Godard's "Breathless" is considered the defining, instigating film of the French New Wave.
It begins abruptly and takes a while to get going: Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a character we barely know, drives a stolen car around, talks at the camera, and shoots a police officer who has tried to pull him over.
The cool jazz score adds to the hip, laid-back tone.Since I didn't care for the movie too much until the scenes between Michel and Patricia, I believe a lot of the credit for the film's success has to go to the charismatic performances of Belmondo and Seberg.
Seberg plays Patricia as a confused girl who is delighted by the attention she gets as an American in France.It's easy to see why "Breathless" was so influentialthe jump cuts, the ragged style perfectly match this story about amoral, aimless youth.
Patricia apes everything she sees, from her Interviewee's facial gestures to Michel's own.Don't let all this technical mumbo fool you, I did my thesis on Godard and would happily bore the ass off you with a lecture in great detail about this film, but the fact is, it's a stormer.Grips you by the throat and shakes the hell out of you, and it doesn't let go until the final breath.Fantastically, artistically magnificent.
Well, À bout de souffle does not put you under the pressure, it takes you for a ride, and you follow for 90 minutes its incredibly young characters, common crook (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and his American free-spirited girlfriend (Jean Seberg) on their journey on the streets of 1960-th Paris along with Raoul Coutard's legendary camera.
The script treatment, written by Francois Truffaut a year or two before Jean-Luc Godard filmed the movie, is used more or less as the basis for the plot and the dialogue, sans screenplay.
Jean-Luc Godard's cinema changing film about a young tough in love with American movies and an American girl changed European cinema.I don't know if it was for the better or worse.
Godard was truly a visionary and an incredibly talented, passionate "auteur"."Breathless" plot is rather simple: Michel Poiccard/Laszlo Kovacs (Jean-Paul Belmondo), our anti-hero, is a young criminal on the run from the police, after stealing a car and killing a cop.
I would recommend 'Breathless' as as essential viewing for every film buff because of its technique and style,  but if you were to ask me if I honestly ENJOY watching this movie I would have to say no, I don't..
With the story of a man on the run calling himself Laszlo Kovacs (a cinematographer of the time), Jean-Luc Godard arrived in the movies (well, on the production end, at least).
François Ozon,one of the most talented contemporary French directors,told once he did not care about the nouvelle vague.With notable exceptions (Demy,Malle,Chabrol),I do not either.The nouvelle vague and particularly Godard were the so called saviours of a moribund cinema.Some critics talked about the fascist arrogance of those young Turks and I can find little fault with the opinions expressed."Before us (nouvelle vague) ,there was a difference of quality between a Renoir and a Duvivier movie;now ,there's also a difference of nature" It's talking nonsense."A bout de souffle" features a plot which finds a lot of its inspiration in the American film noirs,it's not bad,but anyway,it's not the story that counts ,it's the form.But this art is pretty arty,and all that made the French cinema great:painstaking cinematography,strong screenplays,in a nutshell what made cinema magic,par excellence the show,almost everything was swallowed by the "wave" ."A bout de souffle" (breathless) was probably a metaphor of the "old hat" cinema which Godard despised.Its release had an unfortunate outcome:great directors like Duvivier and Carné were relegated to purgatory even their finest works,and the French fifties were buried ;nowadays ,critics tend to restore to favour this overlooked era.We can give the film credit for the actors:both Belmondo and Jean Seberg were excellent.But this would be milestone in cinema history is a good example of how smart artists can manipulate the crowds..
While the movie's writer, Truffaut, went on to far better things--actually making some very good New Wave films, the success of this film encouraged Jean-Luc Godard to make worse films--such as ALPHAVILLE, PIERRE LE FOU, A WOMAN IS A WOMAN and FIRST NAME: CARMEN.
Just when you thought Stanley Kubrick-fanatical elitism was out of control, spend about ten minutes, as an exercise, scouring the internet for French New Wave forums and in-depth analysis of the Godardian methods and you may be surprised at what you find.I'm only stating this because around a year and a half ago, I began my sporadic voyage into the depths of Godard with his most recent picture, at the time, Film Socialisme, which I found to be an assault on every conceivable sense and not in a particularly good way.
This is a bravely-structured and maturely handled annihilation to every cinematic convention prior to its 1960 release down with class and impenetrable style on part of Godard.The story - even though it is relatively the least of our concerns - follows Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo), who is trying to emulate the characteristics possessed by Humphrey Bogart during the particular 40s/50s era of menacing American crime dramas that billed him as the lead actor.
'Breathless' is also one of the initial 'New Wave' films which started the whole MTV style i.e. jump cuts, fractured sound thing.
Hailed among the films that started the French New Wave, Jean-Luc Godard's "Breathless" is a choppy, anarchic film as commanding as it is carefree.
A riff on the American crime/gangster films of the two decades that preceded it, "Breathless" has aspects of both imitation and transcendence, but mostly a liberated spirit that no doubt constituted a change in French filmmaking.Embodying that spirit is star Jean-Paul Belmondo as car thief Michel Poiccard, a man who lives by the whim of his desire, even when it means grinding his ever-thrumming internal engine to a halt for the sake of a woman, specifically Patricia (Jean Seberg), an American in Paris hawking newspapers as she aspires to be a journalist.
Although Belmondo's performance sets the tone and guides the film (as does Michel's shooting of a police officer, inciting the action), in so many ways it revolves around Seberg's driven, liberated feminine energy.Godard's use of jump cuts (a film technique born out of a need to cut down the runtime while avoiding chopping entire scenes) suggests he's something of a rebel filmmaker, but there are lengthy takes too as time seems to stop in Patricia's apartment as they each feel out how they feel about each other.
Michel's relentless libido seems to dominate this section in a rather distracting way, but operating in minimal space, Godard shows his sure-handedness and awareness of the classic cinematic techniques that surely inspired him.With the exception of when Belmondo and Seberg share screen time, the storytelling isn't nearly as compelling as the energy and style of the film.
The way that the romance and the crime story cross paths in the end turns out to be a saving grace of the narrative and make a good case for the film as an intellectual accomplishment, but if the film is indeed a triumph, it's because of the visuals, the pacing, the repetition of the jazz piano score culminating in a wholly unique cinematic experience.Above all else, "Breathless" embodies this feverish, burning passion of cinema as art form, evident purely in its playfulness and recklessness.
ridiculous, false (not a single emotion is sensed), repetition of cliché senseless sentences, stupid plot, the only average scene is the last one; the only reason it got a success in the 1960s is a sheepish tendency to follow blindly the intellectual fashion of that time; i just saw it 40 years after the 1st time and had a very hard time to stay until the end; the French Nouvelle Vague does not match any of the contemporaneous high quality movies made by the other people; any Japanese, Iranian, Egyptian, Swedish or British (not to mention Hitch and American classics) great movie of the fifties is worth 1.000 Godards.
And yet "Breathless" is a kind of worship of Seberg, incomparably sharp and stunning in director Jean-Luc Godard's take.But Godard is such a darling of the intellectual anti-Hollywood, Hollywood worshipping French New Wave, everyone looks the other way.
Paris.Yes, this wonder does usher in modern cinema, but it keeps eluding Godard's grasp, as Michel (American cinema; masculinity; irresponsibility; style; action) and Patricia (modernism; ambition; commitment; lessons from Melville) battle, ironically, for his soul.For all the subversion, irony, parody, pastiche, self-reflexivity, alienation techniques Godard hurls in our faces, it is impossible not to be captivated, on a conventional level, by the romance of 'A bout de souffle', its giddy narrative, its charismatic stars.It is said that the inverse proportion given, in a supposed crime movie, to a brief cop-killing and a lengthy bedroom discussion, neuters the film as a crime movie - not true; it takes us where crime movies never went before (except 'Bob le flambeur', of course).Not misogynistic: both Patricia and Godard inform on Michel.We are not watching Michel and Patricia in a plot about murder and money; we are watching Belmondo, Seberg, Godard and Paris playing a film called 'A Bout de souffle'.Far from distancing us from 'film', this realism brings us nearer.
As they talk, make love and unenthusiastically evade the police, Godard reveals them to be the sort of young people that the movies had never before portrayed, bustling in the here and now, unmindful of traditional ethics, desperate to affect views and approaches to life like a fashion style.
In the same year that William Wyler shot Ben-Hur, Jean-Luc Godard invented modern cinema with ingenious angles, hand-held camera, jump cuts, natural dialogue and an emphasis in the relationships between the characters more than in the actual plot.Godard takes a typical film noir plot to criticize both the amorality of his generation and the obsession of many young people to be like their heroes of the screen.
There is a sequence that lasts for thirty five minutes in which they're basically talking in bed, and this scene plays of with engaging and natural dialogue and overall feels like just ten minutes have passed, and by looking at the ending and all the dialogues in the film it seems to me highly improbable that this film was made without and actual written script (as the legend says).The performances, especially from Jean Seberg, are excellent and she is both adorable and despicable, while Jean-Paul Belmondo gives his most iconic character a true and realistic feel.À Bout De Soufflé is a relationship-based film noir with groundbreaking direction and editing, fascinating dialogues, highly influential performances both in and outside the film and it is a masterpiece from Jean-Luc Godard.Rating: 5/5..
The truth is " jump cut " is as old as cinema itself ) , we see hand held camera / fly on the wall directing and perhaps most strangely of all we are treated to an inappropriate soundtrack though this is of course done on purpose The only other performance I recall seeing from Jean Paul Belmondo is the end scenes of CASINO ROYALE but he's very good here as Michel .
Breathless was a film I did not warm up to easily the first time I saw it, as it was my first film I had seen from Jean-Luc Godard, and thought it was (un-fairly) too "French".
In fact, it is what pretty much anyone who has praise for the movie says it is: It's one of the benchmarks of post-modernist film-making (what Godard said was accidental in "jump-cuts", evident in the fast pace of when Michel is in the car at the beginning of the film), and it is quite a good deal of fun even when it slows down and we get those long hand-held shots by Raoul Cotard.
One of the least intolerable films Jean Luc Godard gave us, if that praise is faint enough for you."Breathless" is easily one of the most accessible of Godard's films, and while it still features a great many of the French New Wave trappings that exist for the sole purpose of pulling you out of the world of the film, it still manages to tell a story peopled with characters that we care about.
Jean-Paul Belmondo has never been a truly great actor; after playing in some early Godards he appeared mainly in quite bad Hollywood-style French thrillers.
The pair spend the next few days making love, talking and stealing cars to get enough money to get to Italy; however as the police close in on Michel he gets increasingly desperate and fed up.Having gone to the cinema earlier and suffered the American version of Taxi, I decided to try and purge the badness from my system by watching a classic or two over the next few days  one of these classics was this film, which I do believe everyone who loves the cinema should try and see this at least once if only to be able to understand the wider origins and influences on the people who are currently influencing the next generation.
The film is full of iconic images as well as a very French sense of detached cool that is very much of its time but it is also an interesting character piece with good dialogue and good performances from Seberg and Belmondo, who can't have been aware of what they were taking part in..
Jean-Luc Godard's 1960 film was important, I suppose, to the burgeoning French New Wave.
Jean-Luc Godard's New Wave romantic-drama, credited with starting a newly-raw and exciting cycle in French cinema, involves Jean-Paul Belmondo as a thief on the run from police.
And there are many instances when the dialogue does nothing to further the story, but the direction makes up for that.As a newcomer to the French New Wave, I have no idea what the majority of films in this movement are like.
A few years later, Godard shot in 1959 "À bout de soufflé", a motion picture that had a strong impact on me: I did not know what was going on, with so many new elements before my eyes, like the jump cuts during a car ride, the long sequence with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg in a hotel room, or the last tracking shot when Belmondo is running for his life and Seberg acquires his gestures.
And no other film represents the French New Wave more coherently than Jean-Luc Godard's dazzling 1960 picture, 'Breathless'.
An ending of a French New Wave film is not typical Hollywood: the closing of the picture would be completely unexpected like Michel's  tongue in cheek' demise.
I love the French Nouvelle Vague period, and most of the films from that era are masterpieces of cinema, including many works by Jean-Luc Godard."Breathless" is not one of these.
It is a boring film, badly directed, based on a childish screenplay, starring a young Jean-Paul Belmondo before he reached his age of acting maturity and whose style and manners move from "dramatic" to idiotic between endless bedroom conversations and changing face expressions fit to make you fall asleep.It is worth spending 90 minutes for this movie only to see the outdoor scenes of Paris in 1960, and enjoy the beautiful face and good performance of Jean Seberg who unfortunately passed away almost 20 years later..
Maybe it's because a friend of mine told me before I saw it that it was brilliant, so I had high expectations.That aside, there is ONE thing I really liked about this movie, the main character is a huge fan of Bogart, who represents the Hollywood Godard departs from in all his films..
Besides the fact that you will save $100,000 another reason to skip Film School is that you won't be required to sit through a screening of "Breathless" - a class that should be titled "How to Make a Self-Indulgent Home Movie Posing As Art" that examines what is essentially an exercise in cinematic masturbation.Okay, Godard did things differently.
A character study about Michel ( Jean-Paul Belmondo ), a young criminal who acts tough and tries to be like Bogart, and Patricia (Jean Seberg), an American who sells the New York Herald- Tribune.
In truth, one is expected, even urged, to admire it for its defects.Jean-Luc Godard (who is Swiss, though considered one of the pillars of the French New Wave) still makes movies today in 2018, at 87 years of age.
Jean-Luc Godard's "Breathless" is a landmark film in the world of cinema.
The French New Wave which started in the 50s with young directors looking to make fresh, personal pictures allowed Jean-Luc Godard to write and direct this masterpiece.
The director of this film, Jean-Luc Godard is considered the Godfather of the French "New Wave" movement.