It stars Jean-Paul Belmondo as a wandering criminal named Michel, and Jean Seberg as his American girlfriend Patricia.

[4] Along with François Truffaut's The 400 Blows and Alain Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour, both released a year earlier, it brought international attention to new styles of French filmmaking.

At the time, Breathless attracted much attention for its bold visual style, which included then unconventional use of jump cuts.

It has since been considered one of the best films ever made, repeatedly appearing in Sight & Sound magazine's decennial polls of filmmakers and critics on the subject.

Penniless and on the run from the police, he turns to an American love interest, Patricia, a student and aspiring journalist, who sells the New York Herald Tribune on the boulevards of Paris.

The ambivalent Patricia unwittingly hides him in her apartment as he simultaneously tries to seduce her and call in a loan to fund their escape to Italy.

[5]: 39 Breathless was loosely based on a newspaper article that François Truffaut read in The News in Brief about Michel Portail and his American journalist girlfriend Beverly Lynette.

In November 1952, Portail stole a car to visit his sick mother in Le Havre and ended up killing a motorcycle cop named Grimberg.

Godard was working as a press agent at 20th Century Fox when he met producer Georges de Beauregard.

[8] Fellow New Wave director Jacques Rivette appears in a cameo as the dead body of a man hit by a car in the street.

[15][16] Godard envisaged Breathless as a documentary and tasked cinematographer Raoul Coutard to shoot the entire film on a hand-held camera with next to no lighting.

According to Coutard, the film was virtually improvised on the spot, and Godard wrote dialogue in an exercise book that no one was allowed to see.

[8] Actor Richard Balducci said shooting days could range from 15 minutes to 12 hours, depending on how many ideas Godard had.

Producer Georges de Beauregard wrote a letter to the crew complaining about the erratic shooting schedule.

Coutard claimed Beauregard got in a fistfight with Godard when he found the director at a café on a day when he had called in sick.

[14] For certain street scenes, Coutard hid in a postal cart with a hole for the lens and packages piled on top of him.

Breathless was processed and edited at GTC Labs in Joinville by Cécile Decugis and his assistant Lila Herman.

[8] Pierre Rissient said that the jump cut style was not intended during the film's shooting or the initial stages of editing.

[12]: 72  Luc Moullet wrote, "Of all the films now being made by the newcomers to French cinema, À bout de souffle is not the best, since Les 400 coups has a head start on it; it is not the most striking - we have Hiroshima mon amour for that.

[24] Bosley Crowther called the film a "fascinating communication" which is "emphatically unrestrainedly vicious, completely devoid of moral tone" and shocking due to the "vigor of its reportorial candor".

Though he found the film too insubstantial to be remembered, he concluded "the technique should linger, and so should these talents, here so highly visible and memorable.

He explains the rigidity of cinematic bedroom scenes with their "definite pace from window to bed and climactically into the sheets.

"[27] Richard Brody enthused, "Breathless opened...not in an art house but at a chain of four commercial theaters, selling 259,046 tickets in four weeks.

The eventual profit was substantial...The film's success with the public corresponded to its generally ardent and astonished critical reception.

"[28] Roger Ebert included it on his "Great Movies" list in 2003, writing that "No debut film since Citizen Kane in 1942 has been as influential," dismissing its jump cuts as the biggest breakthrough, and instead calling revolutionary its "headlong pacing, its cool detachment, its dismissal of authority, and the way its narcissistic young heroes are obsessed with themselves and oblivious to the larger society.

Its critical consensus states, "Breathless rewrote the rules of cinema -- and more than 50 years after its arrival, Jean-Luc Godard's paradigm-shifting classic remains every bit as vital".

[27] Hubert Dreyfus sees the film as exemplifying Nietzsche's conception of ("active" versus "passive") nihilism.

Throughout the film, "dégueulasse" has been clearly used to mean "disgusting" in reference to things like Michel's request for a loan and the music of Frédéric Chopin.