Nouvelle Vague, by Richard Linklater, a new film centred on the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s classic Breathless, will be released in October in France. Here I would like to focus on the original.
Along with Francois Truffaut’s 400 Blows (Les quatre cent coups, 1959), Breathless is one of the foundation stones of the French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague). It is a remarkable achievement. Godard knew little about directing, and a number of the innovations in the film (jump cuts, loose narrative structure) could be put down to his inexperience. Nevertheless, Breathless was highly influential. The plot is simple. Michel Poiccard, a small-time crook (Jean-Paul Belmondo), steals a car and later shoots a cop. He hides out at the apartment of his lover Patricia (American actress Jean Seberg) but the police close in on him.
Both Godard and Truffaut demonstrated that you didn’t have to spend years doing an apprenticeship in a big studio. Shooting on location, directors were no longer studio-bound, enabling a freewheeling, lively, occasionally rough-edged, style of film-making that caught the spirit of the time. Many followed suit: in Italy, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and elsewhere. You can’t really claim to be a lover of cinema until you have seen both these films.
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