Breathless

À bout de souffle

Dir. Jean-Luc Godard, 1959, 90 min

With Jean Seberg, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Daniel Boulanger, Jean-Pierre Melville

In French and English with English subtitles

Winner, Silver Bear for Best Director, 1960 Berlin International Film Festival

Jean-Luc Godard burst onto the film scene in 1960 with this jazzy, free-form, and sexy homage to the American film genres that inspired him as a writer for Cahiers du Cinéma. With its lack of polish, surplus of attitude, anything-goes crime narrative, and effervescent young stars Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, Breathless helped launch the French New Wave and ensured that cinema would never be the same. — Criterion

“There is simply no other film which demonstrates so perfectly what it feels like to be young and in love.” — The Guardian

“This movie liberated the cinema—the stories you could tell and the ways you could tell them—as clearly and cleanly as Picasso freed painting and the Sex Pistols rebooted rock.” — The Boston Globe