Breathless is a french movie that was released in the 1960. It talks about a sociopathic criminal who steals a car and murders a motorcycle policeman who tries to pursue him. He then returns back to his American girlfriend and begins hiding from the police while continuously trying to seduce her. Towards the end of the film, she discovers what he has done and turns him over to the police. He then accepts the fact that he’s going to get arrested. The police accidentally shoot him and ends up killing him. 

The movie has very different shooting style from a lot of movies. Instead of having long scenes, Jean- Luc Godard, the director of this movie, constantly uses jump cuts which results in the movie either jumping into a new scene or cutting to the same scene from other places. These cuts show the passing of time like the, for instance, in the car driving scene. Now in the scene where the girl meets up with the American man in the cafeteria, the scene is meant to keep the audience focused on the story by disorienting them with the rough sound and the visual differences and abrupt cuts. The movie was made in france and shown in black and white, it shows to the use of a lot of jump cuts to keep the audiences interested since the movies back then were somewhat longer than they are today. The film has a lot of humorous moments made especially the main character which is interesting because it contrasts what he does to the narrative storyline. Another interesting thing about the movie is that in some scenes, there is nothing particularly happening yet we hear dramatic music playing. Then, later in the film, we hear dramatic music again when a dramatic event occurs. The music played at the beginning in the non dramatic scene is almost giving us a glimpse of what will happen later on, in the dramatic scene. This keeps the audience interested because it builds up tension.
Sometime during the end of the film the actor does a little twist which seemed very interesting to me because when the character finally decides to turn himself in, it’s almost like he decided to live realistically, to stop his negative thinking. See, negative thinking is usually associated with the colour black, he’s thinking either this or that, either black or white. Negative people tend to think that way. Perhaps it’s a reference to living in colour which was somewhat a new concept back then in films. After that, he gets shot by the police for being seen as aggressive and hostile towards the police. 

The genre of this movie would most probably be identified as romantic comedy because of the humorous moments made by the character and his girlfriend. The reason I say probably is because it also has other genres merged with it. Genres like drama, tragedy crime. Crime because of the character actually being followed by the police. In this movie, there is no reference to other films even though the main character shows an interest in Bogart who was casted in films like Casablanca. Casablanca shows Humphrey is a very negative side but who is also very noble. He’s very similar to the character in Breathless because he’s very negative, blunt and even rude on some occasions. The character has an all-or nothing idea of what should happen. After a long time of having this all or nothing idea, he decides to let go of it and surrenders. 


Breathless is a very interesting film with a lot of interesting elements in it. It’s very light and humorous in terms of what the character says but also has a darker side to it. It’s the perfect example of how a movie contain more than one genre in it.