Breathless is the 1960 French film directed by Jean-Luc Godard and starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg. Its original French title is À bout de souffle, literally meaning “Out of Breath.” Belmondo plays Michel Poiccard, a restless criminal, while Seberg plays Patricia Franchini, an American student and aspiring journalist in Paris.
The film became a defining work of the French New Wave, a movement that challenged traditional studio filmmaking with location shooting, youthful characters, looser storytelling, and more visibly experimental editing. Godard's use of jump cuts—abrupt edits that preserve the feeling of a moving scene while skipping portions of time—became especially influential.
Breathless was Godard's first feature-length film and helped establish Belmondo as a major actor. It was inspired partly by American crime movies, yet its style is distinctly self-aware and European. The alternatives Band of Outsiders, Pierrot le Fou, and Contempt are also associated with Godard, but they are different films, which makes the title and cast combination decisive.