Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is a young hoodlum who models himself after Humphrey Bogart. After stealing a car in Marseille, he heads for Paris, gunning down a cop on the way. Once in the capital he meets up with an American student and aspiring journalist Patricia (Jean Seberg), who sells copies of the New York Herald Tribune on the Champs-Elysee. Patricia agrees to hide him while he tries to contact various criminal associates to cash a cheque for him so that he can evade the police dragnet and make a break for Italy. Ultimately, however, she betrays him and the cops shoot him down on the street.

A simple plot synopsis cannot do justice to what is one of the most revolutionary and influential films in the history of cinema. Based on a scenerio by fellow Cahiers du Cinema critic-turned-director Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard’s cinematic debut rips up the rule-book of classical Hollywood style, fracturing his story with deliberate jump cuts, improvisations, a reliance on natural light and settings, hand held camera and a loose narrative form. It contains numerous references to other films, particularly American B-movies (it’s dedicated to Monogram Pictures), and there are quotations and allusions throughout to myriad writers, artists and philosophers.

Much of the film’s enduring appeal is down to the iconic performances of the two leads. Jean Seberg, with her short-cropped blonde hair, American-accented French, and relaxed naturalistic acting, was a new kind of screen heroine. While the Bogart-obsessed Belmondo, cigarette permanently dangling from his mouth, turns in a star-making performance as the existential anti-hero Michel.

The other great character of the film is Paris itself. Raoul Coutard’s camera captures the dark, neon-lit boulevards, the Champs-Elysees bathed in sunlight, the city through the window of a quiet Parisien apartment -- all these evoke a sense of romance in spite of Godard’s other stylistic distancing effects. He was trying for irony, and while the overall effect indeed is reflexive (perhaps the first post-modern film!), there’s no escaping the dramatic swell. Perhaps that’s why the film is still watched - it works as both an art film and a classic thriller.

On it’s release, A Bout de Souffle won awards and became a world wide hit. Together with Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups and Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour, it announced the arrival of the Nouvelle Vague as a force to be reckoned with and marked the debut of a major new directing talent.