They don’t come much cooler than Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg in Jean-Luc Godard’s Nouvelle Vague classic
BREATHLESS (À BOUT DE SOUFFLE) (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Wednesday, July 3, and Thursday, July 4, 1:30
Tickets: $12, in person only, may be applied to museum admission within thirty days, same-day screenings free with museum admission, available at Film and Media Desk beginning at 9:30 am
212-708-9400
www.moma.org
The fiftieth-anniversary restoration of Jean-Luc Godard’s Nouvelle Vague classic, Breathless, which came out in 2010, will leave audiences, well, breathless. Godard’s first feature-length film, buoyed by an original treatment by François Truffaut and with Claude Chabrol serving as technical adviser, is as much about the cinema itself as it is about would-be small-time gangster Michel Poiccard (an iconic Jean-Paul Belmondo), an ultra-cool dude wandering from girl to girl in Paris, looking for extra helpings of sex and money and having trouble getting either. Along the way he steals a car and shoots a cop as if shooing away a fly before teaming up with Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg) and heading out on the run. Godard references William Faulkner and Dashiell Hammett, Humphrey Bogart and Sam Fuller as Michel and Patricia make faces at each other, discuss death, and are chased by the police. Anarchy prevails, both in Belmondo’s character and the film as a whole, which can go off in any direction at any time. Godard himself shows up as the man who identifies Michel, and there are also cameos by New Wave directors Jean-Pierre Melville and Jacques Rivette. The beautiful restoration, supervised by the film’s director of photography, Raoul Coutard, also includes a new translation and subtitles that breathe new life into one of cinema’s greatest treasures. Breathless is screening July 3 & 4 at 1:30 as as part of MoMA’s continuing series “An Auteurist History of Film,” which continues in July with such other seminal international works as Satyajit Ray’s Teen Kanya, Blake Edwards’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player.