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A revolution swept French cinema into the 1960s, and this film seized the public by its throat. La Nouvelle Vague (the New Wave) was a reaction against the formal polish of the well-made French film, a style too stuffy and impersonal for a radical group of critics who wrote for the influential magazine 'Cahiers du Cinema'. Among them were Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, all of whom became trail-blazing film-makers.
In "A Bout de Souffle" Godard paid homage to the pace and energy of American gangster B-movies of the 1940s. He took his plotline from a news item supplied by Truffaut, in which a cop-killer was harboured by his girlfriend, and casually betrayed for the reward money.
The young Jean-Paul Belmondo, his face battered by boxing, was cast in the lead, modelling his manner on his idol, Humphrey Bogart. He is introduced as a petty street thief in Marseilles. En route to Paris in a stolen car, he kills a cop who tries to stop him. Later he holes up in the Paris apartment of an American girl (Jean Seberg) who ekes out a perilous living selling newspapers.
An informer (Godard himself) spots Belmondo, and the police offer her (Seberg) a deal that ends with her lover shot down on the street in front of her.
The thin, conventional storyline is swept along by the imaginative, urgent style with its then innovative jump cuts, overlapping dialogue and handheld camerawork. A landmark film, it forever changed perceptions of cinema.
French with English subtitles.
