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)
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
Thursday, March 22, 1:15
Series runs March 19-29
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.com
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 March 22 at 1:15 as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s “15 for 15: Celebrating Rialto Pictures” series, consisting of fifteen films reissued and restored over the last fifteen years by the art-house distributor founded by Film Forum programmer extraordinaire Bruce Goldstein. The series includes such other seminal works as Melville’s Army of Shadows and Léon Morin, Priest, Robert Hamer’s It Always Rains on Sunday, Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria, Claude Berri’s The Two of Us, and Mel Brooks’s The Producers.