I just re-watched Godard's famous first feature film, À Bout de Souffle (1960), which I hadn't seen for four years or so. While no doubt one of the most overrated filmmakers ever, Godard does achieve some magic with this little gem. It is little in many senses of the word; flat, straightforward – "energy over substance", etc., and certainly fails to evoke any 'real' emotions with its never-ending parade of coquetries. But this is perhaps the purpose of it: the celebrated Godardian jump cut is much more about establishing a meta-filmic mood rather than conveying any of the purported political messages. Nay, the merit of Godard's film lies in the dream world it creates, a world completely devoid of morality and, indeed, mortality in any important sense of the word. The love expressed in À Bout de Souffle is not real love, but cinematic love. Its people are not real people, but (non-trivially) cinematic people. It's a movie which couldn't have been made by anyone other than a film critic.
Aron
