Watching Breathless (À bout de souffle)
today, with the benefit of fifty years of critical hindsight, I am struck by the way it so obviously indicates the trajectory its director's career would take over time. Jean-Luc Godard, who defended/lauded underrated American B-movies as a critic for Cahiers du Cinéma, presents Breathless as both a tribute to and rejection of said films all at once, opening with a title card dedicating the film to Monogram Pictures while doing his best to overcome the budgetary and structural obstacles such films were often subject to. It's through his protagonists' interplay, though, that we see the earliest spark of Godard's revolt against the status quo.
