Seen from the front, the packaging for the Criterion Collection edition of Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (À bout de souffle) is rather spartan. Unlike most other Criterion boxes, there is no still from the film, nor any other graphic representation of the contents therein, just "Breathless, a film by Jean-Luc Godard": a simple fact stated simply.
And Breathless is a simple film in many respects: shot in black and white on a low budget with a tiny cast and crew, the movie is a compact yarn about a small-time Parisian hood who shoots a cop, sequesters himself with an American girl while he ducks the police, and gets gunned down by the gendarmes when she turns him in. It's an archetype owing most to Dillinger, whose girlfriend sold him out to the G-men who would gun him down in an alley next to Chicago's Biograph movie theater; the young Godard, who had been a critic for Cahiers du cinema, dedicated Breathless to Monogram Pictures, an American studio known for knocking out gangster B-pictures, including a 1945 version of Dillinger.
Yet saying Breathless is a gangster picture is like saying that David Lynch's Blue Velvet is a murder mystery. Before Breathless, movies were vehicles that took audiences from point A to point B, playing by a certain set of rules. Breathless, on the other hand, treats its plot with a kind of ambivalence, moving from point to point as if keeping an appointment. Fully a third of the film takes place in Patricia's (Jean Seberg) bedroom as Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo) tries to bed her - a digression that does nothing to move the film "forward." Furthermore, the actors look and behave as if they belong in a movie: Belmondo with his too-large tweed jacket and insectile sunglasses exuding a cynicism and diffidence well in advance of his too-few years; Seberg with her movie star posturing, her youthful indifference to being wrapped up with a murderer - indeed, when she turns Belmondo's character in, she does so not because she is wracked with guilt or afraid of any consequences, but simply because it is what her character is expected to do.
Godard has claimed time and again that his intention was to make a genre picture, and in doing so, bend it to his own intellectual and theoretical purposes, explicitly building off of a preexisting cinematic language. In that sense, it can be said that Breathless is a movie of a movie; in an interview with Cahiers du cinema, Godard himself admitted that Belmondo's character dies at the end of the film because his "avowed ambition was to make an ordinary gangster film" and therefore, he "had no business deliberately contradicting the genre." This supreme self-awareness is both an act of reverence and of deconstruction; a contradiction that gets to the very root of why a film such as Breathless endures while those that inspired it have faded into obscurity. Speaking of himself and his colleagues in the New Wave, Godard said, "When we were at last able to make films, we could no longer make the kind of films that made us want to make films." In making Breathless, he exposed the fallacy of trying to do so.
