(À bout de souffle)
Watch Jean-Luc Godard’s ground-breaking first feature alongside Richard Linklater’s playful making-of tribute, Nouvelle Vague.
Petty crook Michel Poiccard (Belmondo) steals a car, kills a cop and looks to hide out in the Paris apartment of his American girlfriend Patricia (Jean Seberg). Co-scripted on the hoof with Claude Chabrol and François Truffaut, the film embraces the tropes of American film noir while smashing the classic rules of filmmaking left right and centre. Godard’s anti-hero – dark glasses, fedora, cigarette dangling from his mouth – is the epitome of the 1930s gangster, reckless and amoral but somehow ultra-modern too. Breathless made Belmondo into a star
