Breathless (Á bout de souffle) review (DVD) ★★★★★

Do believe the hype. Somewhere in the Venn diagram of films people order you to watch because they’re really good, so they say, which could just mean they’re enjoyable in a worthy chin-scratching, clock-watching way, and the films that actually are really good, you’ll find Breathless.

Made in 1960, Jean-Luc Godard’s directorial debut follows small-time crook and Humphrey Bogart wannabe Michel (Belmondo) over the course of a couple of days. Michel shoots a policeman and tries to persuade his American girlfriend Patricia (Seberg) to join him in taking off to Italy. But Patricia’s torn because it would mean abandoning her fledgling writing career.

Contemporary cinema owes a huge debt to Breathless. (For any musos reading, think about what modern rock owes The Pixies. Then triple it.) It pioneered the jump cut and epitomised the nouvelle vague. When released, it fizzed with originality. Godard’s striking style ripped up and rewrote the rules of cinema, while taking in numerous insider film nods and hat-tips – pastiche isn’t a dirty word when it’s done Godard’s way.

But if you’re not in the market for seeing how Godard reimagined film grammar, you can always dispense with the film school bollocks and go back to that Venn diagram. However, while the film is excellent, and was digitally restored and re-released in cinemas before heading to DVD, the disc is not so great.

EXTRAS ★½ There’s a gushy ramble of an intro with Dazed & Confused publisher Jefferson Hack (were the broadsheet film critics all busy or something?); a 1965 interview with Jean-Luc Godard from arts show Tempo; a featurette about Jean Seberg; and a short film called Je t’aime John Wayne, which we’ll come to in a moment. This is supposed to be a celebratory edition but it's somewhat lacking. Just check out the feature-packed US Criterion Collection release, which had a making-of doc that was over an hour long, various video essays and featurettes, interviews with cast and crew… As so often happens, a film that got five-star treatment on DVD on the other side of the pond gets a not-at-all-special release here. Given the significance and brilliance of the film, this isn’t just a mere shame – it’s a travesty.

It gets worse, though. That Criterion edition included a short called Charlotte et son Jules – a pastiche of the Jean Cocteau play Le Bel Indifférent – directed by Jean-Luc Godard. This release also features a short film, directed by someone who is not Jean-Luc Godard and made in 2000, about a middle-class British bloke pretending to be Jean-Paul Belmondo… played by Kris Marshall. Yes, you read that right. There are just four extras on this disc and one of them is a short film starring the bloke with the dopey smile from the really lame BT adverts. It’s quite possibly the worst anniversary celebration since Basil Fawlty had to pretend Sybil was ill.

Je t’aime John Wayne apes the new wave, but a shared mise en scène doesn’t justify its inclusion on the DVD. Ditto the fact it’s vaguely amusing and was nominated for a Bafta. Comic shorts can have their place: the 30 Second Bunnies version of Titanic made it onto the four-disc collector’s edition, but that was already jam-packed with extras. Similarly, the Extraordinarily Deluxe edition of Monty Python and the Holy Grail included a parody made with Lego – but again, it was just the cherry on top of an already very sweet pie. That is not the case here. I have been a DVD critic for five years now. In that time, I have seen a heck of a lot of shoddy releases purporting to be a Special, Ultimate or Collector’s Edition. There’s no industry standard for this and no required minimum spec before you can slap on one of those titles, so I thought I’d seen it all. But it requires an unbelievable amount of Chutzpah to take a film as iconic and important as Breathless, kit it out with precious few extras, slap on a short starring an actor from My Family and then dare to call it a 50th anniversary celebration.