Summary
A French ne'er-do-well steps up from boosting cars and penny ante crimes when he kills a police officer. As the French police close in he attempts to convince a young American student to skip town with him to Italy.
A Monumental Film
Breathless is a film which many people put up on a pedestal as a real game changer. I suppose I have to take a lot of peoples word on that since it came out almost 60 years ago. It is the stuff of film history as it ushered in the French New Wave (an oversimplification I am sure) and gave birth to an era of lightweight cameras and sensitive film stocks that made film making a more accessible art form than it had previously been.
Compared to the films that would build upon it, the jump cuts, audio sampling, and guerrilla style exterior shooting is almost unnoticeable today unless you are told it is there, mostly because of the prevalence of a similar sort of style of editing we see in online videos all the time today.
That is a bit of a problem for this film. Not because the film doesn't do it well but because what was revolutionary in its day is old hat to us. That leaves the film with only its story to stand on and, frankly, I just don't think that it is there.
The story is two main story lines Intersecting. One is a romance and the other a crime thriller.
In the crime thriller we have Michel who goes by an alias at times, trying to get by in Paris. He isn't exactly a successful criminal as he never seems to have cash and, since at the very start of the film he kills a police officer, it doesn't seem like he is all that great at dodging the police who are trying to hunt him down.
In the Romance we have Michel trying to woo and American girl Pat, into running away with him. They have been together a few times but leaving her studies and join his life of crime might be too far for her.
The main issue with the film for me is that I just don't find Michel to be a likable character and the two of them, as they talk at length about love, seem to know nothing about love at all. Watching them woo each other, kiss, and lounge about lazily together is about as romantic as watching two monkeys have sex.
I was really disappointed by this film. It gets thrown around with "8 1/2" and "The 400 Blows" but I honestly felt that it was my least favorite of the films that many would put on their Movie Mount Rushmore. The Teddy Roosevelt that stands on the side of the mountain but is in no way on the same level as Washington or Lincoln.
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