Review of Breathless (1983) by Alex R — 10 Feb 2016

You jive with the jazzy style. It's smoking cool. You profess to the extremely romantic qualities of the French. And you leave it to Jean Luc-Goddard's imaginative crime thriller to break all the rules of the Hollywood norm. To captivate, and to shock, and to frustrate many, as it must have done, and done so well... What defines a movie? What defines an art form? And if there ARE any pre-conceived notion of what it means to make art in proper fashion- how the fuck can we shake things up??

In Breathless, a petty criminal and bold lover, Michel, is chased and hunted by the Police. As he manages to duck, dodge, and hide under their constant watch, he plots to make his get-way to Italy. His situation gets worsened by the fact that he's just fallen in love with a beautiful young American girl, Patricia, who's determined to be her own woman and find a career in Paris, where the Police are hot on Michel's tail. He'll have to steal her away, and win over her affections, before he's caught on the wrong side of the law.

Bold, daring, and highly creative. Breathless looks as though it could have been made yesterday, now; more than 50 some-odd years after it's initial wide-release. To imagine what it must have been like when it opened in cinemas... It must have been like a UFO sighting in western Kansas... or... It must have been Marty McFly doing Chuck Barry at the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance in Back to the Future. Don't you GET IT? Jean Luc-Goddard time traveled audiences to a future of movie making that was as fresh, and new, and exciting as we've ever managed to make it. Now, certainly, it's not the greatest film ever made. There's a time and a place for such a film, and it wasn't in France in the late 1950's. But it DID manage to pave an extremely large highway in which all Directors and auteur's of the art-form could have the freedom to do things the way they wanted. Freedom to break away from the dogma of the Hollywood industry- that had dominated movie making for nearly 30 years. All of that just plain ended with about 90,000 dollars or Euro or whatever and in just four weeks that it took to shoot! The results speak for themselves. And for a History lesson on cinema and a just damn good time, I encourage you to see Jean Luc- Goddard's "Breathless" yourself, and see what you make of it. Ooh La La.