A Bout de Souffle
By Kit Macdonald
À Bout de Souffle ("Breathless") is a classic among classics of the French New Wave, or Nouvelle Vague, which emerged in the late 1950s and 1960s. Spearheaded by young, iconoclastic filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard (the director of À Bout de Souffle), François Truffaut, Agnès Varda, Éric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol, the movement rejected the polished, formulaic style of traditional French cinema in favour of a more experimental, personal approach.
The film follows Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a charming and reckless young criminal, and the romance he cultivates with Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg), an aspiring journalist from the US who is living in Paris. Michel impulsively kills a policeman and becomes a fugitive, but stays focused on winning Patricia’s affections. À Bout de Souffle contains meta multitudes aside from this main narrative, making for one of the most deeply satisfying experiences in cinema history.