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Breathless is a film where Jean-Luc Godard pays sassy homage to the cheap gangster movies of the American screen. It has been fifty years since it was first shot and it feels just as modern today as it did then. It was the first French new wave film that became famous on a global scale. Godard was 28 when he made this film and the actors, including the lead actor, Jean Paul Belmondo were in their 20s. The film has a sense of youth and vitality which make it feel very lifelike even half a century later. The film was shot with a handheld camera as if reporting a story.This/tag helps explain it more. The cinematographer Raoul Cotard had filmed the French Indo- China War for eleven years in Viet Nam so was very experienced at filming under dire circumstances with a minimum of equipment. There was practically no lighting used. There is a sense of immediacy in the film that brings the viewer to feel as if they have traveled back in time.
The visual style is bold and the use of jump cuts was used as an artistic technique. This is where in the process of editing, a few frames are removed so that the image appears to have jumped from one position to another. It was almost entirely improvised on location and since no permission had been asked to film in different locations, the noise and presence of people and vehicles was very natural. This is another reason why the film feels so real. It feels spontaneous and totally uncontrived since Godard would scribble the script in a book right on location.
Godard won the Berlin International Film Festival Award in 1960 and to date the film holds the rank of 96 fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, an online film aggregator.