Breathless (Jean-Luk Godard)

Breathless (1960).

 This is one of my favourite movies and I advice everybody to watch it! And this is one of my favourite directors as well. The plot is about 2 guys and their adventures. Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is a young petty criminal who models himself on the film persona of Humphrey Bogart. After stealing a car in Marseille, Michel shoots a policeman who has followed him onto a country road. Penniless and on the run from the police, he turns to his American girlfriend Patricia (Jean Seberg), a student and aspiring journalist, who sells the New York Herald Tribune on the streets of Paris. The ambivalent Patricia unwittingly hides him in her apartment as he simultaneously tries to seduce her and call in a loan to fund their escape to Italy. At one point, Patricia says she is pregnant with Michel's child. She learns that Michel is on the run when questioned by the police. Eventually, she betrays him, but before the police arrive, she tells Michel what she did. He is somewhat resigned to a life in prison, and does not try to escape at first. The police shoot him in the street and, after a prolonged death run, he dies “à bout de souffle” (out of breath).

Michel's death scene is one of the most iconic scenes in the film, but the film's final lines of dialogue are the source of some confusion for English-speaking audiences. In some translations, it is unclear whether Michel is condemning Patricia, or alternatively condemning the world in general.

MICHEL: That's really disgusting.

PATRICIA: What did he say?

VITAL: He said, "You are really a bitch."   

PATRICIA: What is "dégueulasse" [bitch]?

 It was Jean-Luk Godards' first feature length work, and one of the earliest, most influential of the French New Wave. At the time, the film attracted much attention for its bold visual style and the innovative use of jump cuts. Breathless, together with François Truffaut's The 400 Blows and Alain Resnais's Hiroshima, Mon Amour, both released a year earlier, brought international acclaim to the French nouvelle vague. It's a huge part of cinema history. Especially in French cinema, but I think that for world's one too.

 The film consists of links to other movies and catch phrases. For example there are some scenes where Michel names himself as Laszlo Kovacs, and this is, actually, a "On the double turn of the key" character, this is a film, directed by Claude Chabrol in 1959.
Another example is Michelle Puakar mentions Bob Montagnier. Bob Montana - is the film's hero. The director is Jean-Pierre Melville "Bob the Gambler" (1955).

 Godard said that the success of Breathless was a mistake. He added "there used to be just one way. There was one way you could do things. There were people who protected it like a copyright, a secret cult only for the initiated. That's why I don't regret making Breathless and blowing that all apart."