Tapis Rouge Classiques returns to De Uitkijk with À bout de souffle by legendary filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard. The film will be introduced on April 24; all subsequent screenings are regular showings. English subtitles are available.
When À bout de souffle premiered in 1960, it was as if cinema had reinvented itself. Jean-Luc Godard, then still a film critic at Cahiers du Cinéma, created a film on a minimal budget and with maximum freedom—one that rewrote, or simply ignored, the rules of the medium.
The story is classic in its simplicity: Michel, a car thief obsessed with Humphrey Bogart, shoots a police officer and seeks refuge with Patricia, a young American journalist in Paris. What follows is a drifting journey through a city in constant motion, and a relationship unfolding somewhere between desire and detachment.
Belmondo and Seberg don’t so much portray characters as embody archetypes: he the charming rebel, she the aloof muse. But it’s Godard’s formal choices that give À bout de souffle its lasting power. The jump cuts, Raoul Coutard’s handheld camerawork, the dialogue that shifts between philosophical and offhanded—all of it contributes to a sense of urgency and spontaneity.
The film became a manifesto of the nouvelle vague, yet it also feels like a deeply personal impulse: a love letter to cinema, and to the freedom to treat it radically. Even now, more than sixty years later, the film remains fresh and elusive.