Avis Metacritic

Breathless remains a living movie that retains the power to surprise and involve us after all these years.

Godard brought to the screen the jagged, intuitive temperament of youth in a way that nobody else had ever done before.

What makes Breathless a masterpiece along with its style is how Godard captures the overall malcontent, which still resonates with much of modern life as we know it and ultimately leaves us all breathless.

There is simply no other film which demonstrates so perfectly what it feels like to be young and in love.

Like Pulp Fiction, Breathless runs on pure movie love, even as its heedless editing and bursts of jazz were redefining the art form. If the picture feels slight for a masterpiece, that’s because Breathless is primarily about itself.

It is a film of flawless consistency and uncompromised truth.

What remains most striking, and most moving, about Godard’s first feature is its sophisticated yet largely guileless faith in the filmic medium, a cinephilia untainted by smugness or cynicism.

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.

What Stravinsky's "La Sacre du Printemps" is to 20th-century music or Joyce's Ulysses is to the 20th-century novel, Godard's first feature, BREATHLESS, is to film.

Say this, in sum, for "Breathless": it is certainly no cliché, in any area or sense of the word. It is more a chunk of raw drama, graphically and artfully torn with appropriately ragged edges out of the tough underbelly of modern metropolitan life.