Бесстыжая (Besstydzhaya)

1960 French film by Jean Luc Godard

Breathless is a 1960 French New Wave crime drama film written and directed by Jean Luc Godard. It stars Jean Paul Belmondo as a wandering criminal named Michel, and Jean Seberg as his American girlfriend Patricia. The film was Godard's first feature length work and represented Belmondo's breakthrough as an actor. Breathless is an influential example of French New Wave (nouvelle vague) cinema. Along with François Truffaut's The 400 Blows and Alain Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour, both released a year earlier, it brought international attention to new styles of French filmmaking. At the time, Breathless attracted much attention for its bold visual style, which included then unconventional use of jump cuts. Upon its initial release in France, the film attracted over two million viewers. It has since been considered one of the best films ever made, appearing in Sight & Sound magazine's decennial polls of filmmakers and critics on the subject on multiple occasions. In May 2010, a fully restored version of the film was released in the United States to coincide with the film's 50th anniversary.

Michel is a youthful, dangerous criminal who models himself on the film persona of Humphrey Bogart. After stealing a car in Marseille, Michel shoots and kills a policeman who has followed him onto a country road. Penniless and on the run from the police, he turns to an American love interest, Patricia, a student and aspiring journalist, who sells the New York Herald Tribune on the boulevards 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. Patricia says she is pregnant, probably with Michel's child. When the police question her, Patricia realizes that Michel is on the run. Eventually she betrays him, but before the police arrive, she tells Michel what she has done. He is somewhat resigned to a life in prison, and does not try to escape at first. A friend of his arrives and attempts to hand him a gun, but he refuses. As the police arrive, the friend drives off, but throws the gun towards Michel, who picks it up. The police shoot him in the street, and after running along the block, he dies.

American philosopher Hubert Dreyfus saw the film as exemplifying Friedrich Nietzsche's conception of ("active" versus "passive") nihilism. On this reading, Michel and Patricia are attracted to each other. Michel is active and bold (modelled on Bogart, whose humorous gestures he adopts), engaging himself into careless actions, including crime. He falls in love with Patricia. Patricia, however, isn’t comfortable in such engagements. In the end, she cooperates with the police and Michel gets shot down by them. Dying in the street he expresses his disgust of her "You make me puke". Her monotone reaction, entirely lacking empathy for her dead friend "What is puke?" indicates her brutal distance to relationships, which Michel knew about all the time already and which consquence it will have for him. The fact that he abandoned the chance to escape before the shot, indicates that he surrendered in this fate eventually.

Breathless was based loosely on a newspaper article that François Truffaut read in The News in Brief. The character of Michel Poiccard is based on real life Michel Portail and his American girlfriend and journalist Beverly Lynette. In November 1952, Portail stole a car to visit his sick mother in Le Havre and ended up killing a motorcycle cop named Grimberg. Truffaut worked on a treatment for the story with Claude Chabrol, but they dropped the idea when they could not agree on the story structure. Godard had read and liked the treatment and wanted to make the film. While working as a press agent at 20th Century Fox, Godard met producer Georges de Beauregard and told him that his latest film was not any good. De Beauregard hired Godard to work on the script for Pêcheur d'Islande. After six weeks, Godard became bored with the script and instead suggested making Breathless. Chabrol and Truffaut agreed to give Godard their treatment and wrote de Beauregard a letter from the Cannes Film Festival in May 1959 agreeing to work on the film if Godard directed it. Truffaut and Chabrol had recently become star directors, and their names secured financing for the film. Truffaut was credited as the original writer and Chabrol as the technical adviser. Chabrol later claimed that he only visited the set twice and Truffaut's biggest contribution was persuading Godard to cast Liliane David in a minor role. Godard wrote the script as he went along. He told Truffaut "Roughly speaking, the subject will be the story of a boy who thinks of death and of a girl who doesn't." As well as the real life Michel Portail, Godard based the main character on screenwriter Paul Gégauff, who was known as a swaggering seducer of women. Godard also named several characters after people he had known earlier in his life when he lived in Geneva Jean Luc chose a violent end because he was by nature sadder than I he had need of [his] particular ending. At the end, when the police are shooting at him one of them said to his companion, 'Quick, in the spine!' I told him, 'You can't leave that in.'" Seberg agreed to appear in the film on 8 June 1959 for $15,000, which was one sixth of the film's budget. Godard ended up giving Seberg's husband a small part in the film. The 1958 ethno fiction Moi, un noir has been credited as a key influence for Godard. This can be seen in the adoption of jump cuts, use of real locations rather than constructed sets and the documentary, newsreel format of filming.

Godard envisaged Breathless as a reportage (documentary), and tasked cinematographer Raoul Coutard to shoot the entire film on a hand held camera, with next to no lighting. In order to shoot under low light levels, Coutard had to use Ilford HP5 film, which was not available as motion picture film stock at the time. He therefore took 18 metre lengths of HP5 film sold for 35mm still cameras and spliced them together to 120 metre rolls. During development he pushed the negative one stop from 400 ASA to 800 ASA. The size of the sprocket holes in the photographic film was different from that of motion picture film, and the Cameflex camera was the only camera that worked for the film used. The production was filmed on location in Paris using an Eclair Cameflex during the months of August and September in 1959, Nearly the entire film had to be dubbed in post production because of the noisiness of the Cameflex camera and because the Cameflex was incapable of synchronized sound. However, all locations were selected before shooting began, and assistant director Pierre Rissient has described the shoot as very organized. Actor Richard Balducci has stated that shooting days ranged from 15 minutes to 12 hours, depending on how many ideas Godard had on a given day. Producer Georges de Beauregard wrote a letter to the entire crew complaining about the erratic shooting schedule. Coutard said that when de Beauregard encountered Godard at a café on a day on which Godard had called in sick, the two engaged in a fistfight. Assistant director Pierre Rissient said that the jump cut style was not intended during the film's shooting or the initial stages of editing. The New York Times critic A. O. Scott wrote in 2010, 50 years after the release of Breathless, that it is both "a pop artifact and a daring work of art" and even at 50, "still cool, still new, still – after all this time! – a bulletin from the future of movies." Roger Ebert included it on his "Great Movies" list in 2003, writing that "No debut film since Citizen Kane in 1942 has been as influential," dismissing its jump cuts as the biggest breakthrough, and instead calling revolutionary its "headlong pacing, its cool detachment, its dismissal of authority, and the way its narcissistic young heroes are obsessed with themselves and oblivious to the larger society." as of 2022, the film holds a 96% approval rating on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 76 reviews, with an average rating of 8.70/10. The site's critical consensus says, "Breathless rewrote the rules of cinema – and more than 50 years after its arrival, Jean Luc Godard's paradigm shifting classic remains every bit as vital." The Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa cited this movie as one of his 100 favorite films.

Godard said 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." In 1964, Godard described his and his colleagues' impact: "We barged into the cinema like cavemen into the Versailles of Louis XV." Breathless ranked as the No. 22 best film of all time in the decennial British Film Institute's 1992 Sight and Sound Critics' Poll. In the 2002 poll, it ranked 15th. Ten years later, in 2012, Breathless was the No. 13 greatest film of all time in the overall Sight and Sound poll, and the 11th greatest film in the concurrent Directors' Poll. In 2018, the film ranked 11th on the BBC's list of the 100 greatest foreign language films, as voted on by 209 film critics from 43 countries. In the 2022 Sight and Sound Critic's Poll, Breathless ranked as No. 38 greatest film of all time, and No. 14 greatest in the Director's Poll.