Breathless
Short description
Michel Poiccard, a young small-time thief, steals a car in Marseille and drives toward Paris. Stopped by traffic police, he shoots one of the pursuing officers and continues on his way. In Paris he looks up Patricia Franchini, an American who sells the New York Herald Tribune on the Champs-Élysées and hopes to become a journalist. He urges her to leave for Italy with him, but detectives have identified him and are closing in.
Jean-Luc Godard directed and wrote the film, the first of the twenty-three features he has made, followed by A Woman Is a Woman in 1961. Georges de Beauregard produced it for SNC, Les Films Impéria and Les Productions Georges de Beauregard. Jean-Paul Belmondo plays Michel, with Jean Seberg as Patricia; Daniel Boulanger, Henri-Jacques Huet and Roger Hanin appear among the thirty credited cast members. The story is set in France and runs ninety minutes.
On IMDb it holds 7.6 out of 10 from around 95,000 votes, and on TMDB 7.5 out of 10 from roughly 2,000 votes, showing a durable following for a film of its age. The critics' rating of 8.9 out of 10 from eighty-two reviews places it well above those audience scores, an unusually wide gap for a crime drama of this period.
What's left behind the scenes
- Melville himself appears in a cameo role as the writer Parvulescu, who gives his first interview to Patricia. Melville borrowed the answers to her questions and his mannerisms from Nabokov – he had observed all of this in one of the writer’s television interviews.
- Godard and Truffaut wrote the script before the start of each shooting day, and the actors had to improvise their dialogue as filming progressed.
- Filming took place from August 17 to September 15, 1959.
- Godard couldn't afford a camera dolly, so the cameraman was wheeled around on a rolling chair in many scenes. He borrowed this technique from Jean-Pierre Melville.
- To make the actors' performance more natural, Godard would explain to them what was required of them in a scene directly during filming.
- In the film, Michel Poicard is sometimes presented as Laszlo Kovacs. Laszlo Kovacs is a character from Claude Chabrol’s 1959 film “Double Play”.
- Michel Poicard mentions someone named Bob Montagne. Bob Montagne is the main character in Jean-Pierre Melville’s film “Bob the Gambler” (1955).
- The film completely lacks subtitles.
Similar movies
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
