Breathless

A small-time car thief named Jesse flees Las Vegas for Los Angeles, where he hopes to reunite with Monica, a French architecture student he met in Nevada. On the way he steals a Porsche and, in the course of the theft, accidentally shoots a highway patrolman. He learns of the killing afterward rather than at the moment it happens, and with the state police pursuing him he takes refuge with Monica, drawing her into a troubled romance that plays out under constant pursuit. The film is Jim McBride's American reworking of Jean-Luc Godard's 1960 French New Wave feature of the same name, moving the story from Paris to the American Southwest and keeping the outline of a fugitive and the young woman drawn into his flight while changing tone and period.

Richard Gere leads as Jesse, with Valérie Kaprisky as Monica, alongside Art Metrano, John P. Ryan, William Tepper and Robert Dunn. McBride directed from a screenplay he wrote with L.M. Kit Carson, and Martin Erlichman produced. It was the first feature McBride directed in the chronological list of his work, preceding The Big Easy, Great Balls of Fire! and Uncovered. Production cost about 8 million dollars and the film took roughly 20 million worldwide.

On IMDb it holds 6 out of 10 from about 12,000 votes, and on TMDB 5.9 out of 10 from 277 votes. A critics' rating of 5.6 out of 10 from 18 reviews places it slightly below the audience scores on both sites.