Breathless

The film (along with Truffaut’s The 400 Blows) that gave rise to the French New Wave tsunami, making Jean-Paul Belmondo a star and morphing the face of an affectless American blonde gamine–Jean Seberg–into that of a heartless noir femme fatale. Belmondo imagines himself a Bogart or a Cagney, but is really a two-bit Parisian hood who falls hard for the little girl in a T-shirt peddling the New York Herald Tribune on the Champs-Élysées. The debut feature by former Cahiers du Cinéma critic Godard, Breathless moves, sounds, and looks like a love story–with cinema. Commissioned for the film’s 50th anniversary in 2010, this 35mm restoration, with freshly revised subtitles by Lenny Borger, was the first in Breathless history.