When À bout de souffle premiered in 1960, it felt as if cinema had reinvented itself. Jean-Luc Godard, then still a film critic at Cahiers du Cinéma, made a film on a minimal budget and with maximum freedom — rewriting, or simply ignoring, the established rules of filmmaking.
The story is classically simple: Michel, a car thief obsessed with Humphrey Bogart, shoots a police officer and seeks refuge with Patricia, a young American journalist in Paris. What follows is a drift through a constantly shifting city, and a relationship suspended somewhere between desire and detachment.
Belmondo and Seberg don’t merely play characters — they embody archetypes: he the charming rebel, she the aloof muse. Yet it’s Godard’s formal decisions that give À bout de souffle its enduring power. The jump cuts, Raoul Coutard’s restless handheld camerawork, the dialogue that veers from philosophical to casually tossed-off — everything contributes to a sense of urgency, of spontaneity.
The film became a manifesto of the Nouvelle Vague, yet it also feels like a personal impulse: a love letter to cinema, and to the radical freedom to play with it. More than sixty years later, it remains fresh, alive, and impossible to pin down.