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Breathless 1959
Jean-Luc Godard's first feature -- a witty, romantic, innovative chase picture with the 26 year old Jean-Paul Belmondo as a Parisian hood, and Jean Seberg as the American girl who casually lives with him and just as casually turns him into the police when he becomes an inconvenience. Godard, who dedicated this film (made for $90,000) to Monogram Pictures, saw something in the cheap American gangster movies of his youth that French movies lacked; he poeticized it and made it so modern (via fast jump cutting) that he, in turn, became the key influence on American movies of the 60s. Here, he brought together disharmonious elements -- irony and slapstick and defeat -- and brought the psychological effects of moviegoing into the movie itself. (His hero was probably the first to imitate Bogart.) The film is light and playfull and off-the-cuff, even a little silly. Yet the giddy, gauche characters who don't give a damn -- the hood who steals a car, kills a highway patrolman, and chases after some money that is owed him for past thefts so he and his impervious, passively butch girl can get to Italy -- are not only familiar in an exciting, revealing way, they are terribly attractive.
Hugely influential film. People still imitate it all the time, but they probably have no idea what they're imitating.
Posted by sheila