Breathless shows what the modern French version of [la nouvelle vague] really looks like, and the result is one of the most genuinely novel films of the lot. As parody, it is as subtly intellectual as [Robert Aldrich's] Kiss Me Deadly was exaggeratedly visceral; as improvisation, it is as unified and witty as [John Huston's] Beat the Devil was chaotic and arch; and as an example of new-wave camp, it is a beaut….

The principle of novelty, in Breathless, lies in its acceptance of an exhausted genre—the Hollywood grade-B crime film—as a simulacrum of reality. Its plot is little more than that of the quickie digest: Footloose Killer on the Run Tangles with Double-dealing Broad as Cops Close In—Big Paris Manhunt. These mediocre clichés are played out in the deadpan style of an actualité, producing a dual impression of great moral wit and intense neurotic despair. The term "romantic nihilism" which critics have applied to many of the new-wave films and to Breathless in particular is apt enough. But the trouble with it is that it tends to make a generalizing cultural analysis of what are essentially cinematic fun and games….

Breathless accomplishes much that is necessary for our present. Classic parallels are uncovered in the commonplace and are witty beyond any since Cocteau's own historic rummagings on behalf of another generation. (p. 54)

Breathless is a mannerist fantasy, cinematic jazz. Watching it, one can hardly avoid the feeling that Godard's intention, above all, was to produce slices of cinema—shots, figments, iconography—what the Cahiers critics talk about. His reality is always cinematized; the camera is always "there."… (pp. 54-5)

Action is all. This article of faith, central to the film noir, is what has always made the aesthetic truth of the film noir seem so shallow to American and British critics; the identification of personality and behavior is both absolute and rudimentary, unpardonably so. Hence, in Breathless, Michel's "Burglars burgle, lovers love, murderers murder … they can't help it" becomes an exact reflection of the crime movie's puerile fatalism.

But it would be a shame to depend exclusively on the words in this film, good as they are. Breathless, from beginning to end, is the total expression of its own meaning. If action is all, spontaneity, improvisation, is the only possible style. It is the style cultivated by Michel as an expression of impermissible masculine virtuosity. He at least is the hero of his own life, even if his life is a cheap film and, in the end, not worth living. Breathless sees an art form as a life-style and vice versa; quite logically, it ends with its hero's death. (p. 55)

Patricia, the American, irretrievably square, emotionally immobile, centerless, complacent, and uncomprehending, touches Michel, the Frenchman, at all those points where he is most vulnerable. She is the triumphant actual artifact of a culture of which he, in his delusion, is the copy, the dupe. He is the dynamo, she the void. Their long magnificently impromptu scene together in and out of bed inaugurates a dialectic of contemporary national manners that is almost Jamesian in its proportions. Their mutual assimilation of each other's backgrounds is as comically and painfully incomplete as it is conscientious. After she betrays—or, more accurately—disposes of him by calling the police, who shoot him down in the street, his bitter and just pronouncement upon her as a human being, "Tu es dégueulasse" ["You are disgusting"], is as far as the film goes. No one says, "Tu es New York"; "Tu es Paris," although it is implied at every second. Breathless shows, with power, irony, and precision, what great cultural convulsions have taken place in our time. Again, as of old, the megalopolis frames the last spasm of the fleeing killer. Paris, beautiful, for centuries dedicated to an ease of individual enterprise, was created for deaths larger than this. (pp. 55-6)