Film Screening: Breathless

Jean-Luc Godard’s films of the 1960s are rich in intellectual references, gorgeous visuals, and music by Michel Legrand—classically French, in their postmodern way. But scrappy, jazzy, black-and-white Breathlessremains what Russell Merritt called “the outlaw artifact of the nouvelle vague.” A very young Jean-Paul Belmondo plays the outlaw hero Michel Poiccard (alias Laszlo Kovacs), who kills a cop and hides in plain sight in Paris. An even younger Jean Seberg announces herself loudly as an American student working for the New York Herald Tribune. “A thrilling reminder of how playful Godard could be” (Ella Taylor, Village Voice).