Praising Breathless for its supposed revolutionary nature would be a bit like praising the emperor’s new clothes for being avant-garde—all bravado and barely concealed emptiness. The film's narrative, not unlike its anti-hero, Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo), struts around with an inflated sense of importance, convinced of its own brilliance because it dares to discard the traditions of filmmaking. But in doing so, it leaves behind a trail of nothingness—an aesthetic void clothed in what might pass for youthful rebellion. Breathless is often regarded as the gold standard of the French New Wave, the birthplace of cool, a pillar of cinematic innovation. But, much like the way a slacker in a black turtleneck might quote Baudrillard or Derrida in order to sound smart, the film's cultural clout is less a result of substance and more a matter of seeming to be radical without really challenging anything at all. To elevate Breathless to the level of “revolutionary,” to place it on some exalted, untouchable pedestal of cinematic genius, is about as productive as having a conversation with a toddler who’s just discovered the word “no” and has decided to wield it as both shield and sword. The film has the brashness, the ambition, the shock value of a teenager who thinks the fact they’ve memorized the lyrics to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” gives them the right to teach a college-level course on Nietzsche. Yes, it was radical in 1960 (yes, yes, we get it)—but now, 60+ years later, praising its so-called innovation feels like looking at a Polaroid of a middle-aged man in a leather jacket, still striking the same pose he did back in the day, but no longer fooling anyone about the fact that he’s really just an aging rock star trying to relive his glory days while declining offers for a reality TV show. It’s all a self-congratulatory wink, an exercise in establishing its “coolness” as some inherently transcendental and untouchable virtue, when, in fact, what’s actually underneath all that jump-cutting swagger is a wide, yawning aesthetic void—empty, yes, but so smugly in-your-face about it that you almost don’t care.

The way Breathless constructs its sense of "cool" and self-importance is an exercise in glorifying emptiness. It’s the kind of film that looks like it’s doing something by virtue of its frenzied editing, its rejection of narrative continuity, its obsessive focus on style and posture—think of it as a Quentin Tarantino film without any of the 'wit' (and I'll put that in quotations, for now, because that might be a topic for another discussion), and the film’s stance here is so shallow it makes the entire philosophical basis of Fight Club look like a dissertation on the nature of identity and self-hood by someone who’s actually thought about what they’re writing. But for all its posturing—its gleeful, almost insufferable air of smugness—it refuses to confront the implications of its own philosophy. This is a film in which nothing happens, and then, once it ends, you realize you never really cared for anything that happened—or for anyone involved. Breathless asks us to believe that the chaotic dance of its form is all that matters, that the jittery camera and jump cuts are the cinema, and the content—well, the content is just an afterthought.

The content hinges almost exclusively on the dynamic between Poiccard and Patricia (Jean Seberg). The irony is that while Breathless purports to depict the spontaneous, unbound freedoms of youth, what it actually shows is a transactional relationship built on exploitation and manipulation—you have a man who thinks that the pursuit of women is just another conquest in his existential quest to be cool. Poiccard is a monster of pure male entitlement: reckless, charming in the worst possible ways, and completely oblivious to the fact that his behavior—chasing down women, constantly seeking adoration, stealing cars, evading the law—has no consequences. The fact that Godard frames Poiccard as an anti-hero worthy of our admiration is the first crack in the film’s supposed wisdom: we are asked, in essence, to embrace Poiccard as the idealized, romanticized embodiment of masculine freedom, when, in fact, he’s a selfish, thoughtless, morally bankrupt young man whose only redeeming quality is that he’s, well, cool. He's like the male equivalent of a '90s grunge band that's all angst and flannel, but absolutely no substance. He’s a cipher for the film’s larger ideological project: Breathless asks us to admire him, not for his complexity, but because, well, he’s cool. He’s a textbook case of a certain brand of male posturing that is still somewhat prevalent in films today, but here it’s dressed up as a metaphor for “freedom” (air quotes). His refusal to abide by any sort of narrative logic, his almost obsessive commitment to being too cool for the camera’s own good, serves as both a stand-in for cinematic rebellion and, ultimately, a harbinger of cinematic self-destruction. His disordered, reckless existence is a form of existential art—art that sacrifices substance for style, much like the way those sought-after coffee table books on minimalism often end up being just empty boxes of white space.

If Poiccard is the vehicle through which the film channels its larger aesthetic posturing, Patricia is the thing that occupies the passenger seat, a woman reduced to little more than a physical object. She’s not a person in any meaningful sense—at least not as we traditionally understand the concept in cinema—she is merely the object of Poiccard's pursuit. She’s like the proverbial MacGuffin in a Hitchcock film, except not even as interesting. In much of the film, she’s little more than a passive recipient of his attention, his love, his manipulations, his violence. Patricia’s character exists not as a person who drives the plot or holds any agency of her own, but as a body to be observed, ogled, and, at best, lightly “contemplated.” For all the ways in which Breathless wants to pass itself off as a revolutionary document, Patricia’s role is an expression of the same gender dynamics that have been perpetuated in cinema since its inception: women exist as ornaments to validate or complicate the male subject’s journey—kind of like the way Jessica Rabbit was designed to exist as the ultimate male fantasy, and yet Breathless makes her look like an academy award-winning portrayal in comparison.

The irony of Breathless’s supposed “revolution” is that, while it upends traditional cinematic conventions—like continuity and character development—it leaves the gendered power structures intact. Patricia is first seen sitting at a café, gazing across the street, smoking a cigarette. It’s no surprise that her character arc (such as it is) consists mostly of waiting for Poiccard’s attention, then briefly resisting him, before ultimately capitulating. What is radical about Breathless, in a bitterly ironic way, is that it proposes this dynamic—this abysmal lack of meaningful interaction between men and women—as a form of rebellious freedom. Godard, like some morally indifferent auteur, aligns us with Poiccard’s male fantasy of unattainable, indifferent women—whose ultimate function is to be swept into his storm of chaos and then discarded—thus reinforcing the patriarchal status quo rather than subverting it. The ultimate message is clear: Women, in this world, are not agents unto themselves but mere extensions of men’s desires. And it’s in this ideological vacuum—the world where Poiccard is the idol of reckless freedom, and Patricia is both a cipher and a pawn—that the film’s true cynicism reveals itself. Breathless wants us to believe that its disjointed structure, its anarchic editing, its flirtations with nihilism, make it a bold statement about the collapse of narrative, about the disintegration of traditional cinema. But this is precisely the problem: the film sacrifices meaning and purpose at the altar of form, all while pretending it’s doing something brave or profound. The jump cuts, the disjointed pacing, the rejection of continuity—these are not inherently profound techniques; they’re just the cinematic equivalent of smirking irreverence. It’s the kind of aesthetic that gives the impression of intelligence without the heavy lifting that comes with actual insight. Godard is like a punk who insists on throwing rocks at the establishment just to avoid confronting the fact that he’s a tourist in the rebellion he pretends to embody.

The coolness of Breathless is an illusion, sustained by a self-congratulatory sense of rebellion that never questions whether its rebellion means anything at all.  It’s like showing up to a party, making a big deal about how you don’t drink the punch, and then sitting in the corner smugly, watching everyone else drink, as if your self-imposed abstinence makes you better than them. There is a laziness in the film’s attempt to replace meaningful drama with the idea of dramatic form—and in this, it bears an uncomfortable resemblance to its protagonist, Poiccard, who refuses to take responsibility for his actions, who never faces the consequences of his irresponsibility, who flits from one moment to the next in a haze of juvenile arrogance. The film replicates this attitude by refusing to meaningfully engage with the real implications of its treatment of gender, identity, and morality—because why think when you can just look so good doing nothing?

And in that way, Breathless is the perfect metaphor for an entire strain of cool: It offers no depth, no insight, no actual reflection on the human condition. What it does offer is a relentless, almost obsessive focus on style—on looking cool, feeling cool, projecting an air of effortless rebellion. Godard, like Poiccard, may think they’re free, but in truth, they’re prisoners of their own image who realize they were never truly free. And in this, we have the ultimate, final irony: a film that prides itself on subverting the very idea of structure and meaning, but in doing so, it never quite manages to subvert the old, worn-out norms it claims to reject. Because in the end, when you strip away the jump cuts, the handheld shots, and the so-called revolutionary edits, all you’re left with is a world where men get to do whatever they want, and women are reduced to mere backdrops—mere objects to be admired, used, and discarded.

If that’s freedom, then count me out.