When it opened in Paris in December 1959, Breathless came close to the box office success of François Truffaut's The 400 Blows. Truffaut's film was considered the public debut of the Nouvelle Vague (New Wave), and Godard's was regarded by critics as the movement's aesthetic manifesto.

"I don't think anyone knew it would be such a big deal." - Pierre Rissient, Godard's assistant director, interviewed on the Criterion Collection DVD of the film

Jean-Luc Godard won the Prix Jean Vigo, an award given since 1951 usually to young directors who exhibit an innovative spirit and the promise of future achievement.

The film won the Best Film award from the French Syndicate of Cinema Critics.

Godard won the Silver Bear award for Best Director at the Berlin International Film Festival. He was also nominated for the Golden Bear award (top honor).

Godard was nominated for Best Director - Foreign Film by the Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists.

Jean Seberg was nominated for Best Foreign Actress by the British film academy (BAFTA).

Breathless ranked as the No. 15 best film of all time in the British Film Institute's 2002 Sight and Sound Critics' Poll.

"Breathless is, in a sense, the farthest out of any of the 'new wave' films. ... Only a tiny critical minority has voiced the opinion that the success of Breathless is because no one has ever seen such a badly made film shown in public before and that the lack of technique is mistakenly viewed as great originality." - Cynthia Grenier, New York Times, May 15, 1960

"What Is It?" - headline of a short review in Newsweek, 1960

"As sordid as is the French film, Breathless ("A Bout de Souffle"), which came to the Fine Arts yesterday-and sordid is really a mild word for its pile-up of gross indecencies-it is withal a fascinating communication of the savage ways and moods of some of the rootless young people of Europe (and America) today. ... It is emphatically, unrestrainedly vicious, completely devoid of moral tone, concerned mainly with eroticism and the restless drives of a cruel young punk to get along. Although it does not appear intended deliberately to shock, the very vigor of its reportorial candor compels that it must do so. ... Say this, in sum, for Breathless: it is certainly no cliché, in any area or sense of the word. It is more a chunk of raw drama, graphically and artfully torn with appropriately ragged edges out of the tough underbelly of modern metropolitan life." - Bosley Crowther, New York Times, February 8, 1961

"I shall never try to communicate in writing to those who do not feel the physical joy and the physical pain which certain moments of Breathless and Vivre sa Vie [1962] caused me." - François Truffaut, 1962

"In order to save a film not worth showing, Godard chopped it up any which way, counting on the critics' susceptibility to being astounded, and they didn't let him down in helping him to launch a new fashion, that of the badly made film. Incorrigible waster of film, author of idiotic and abject comments on torture and denunciation, a self-promoter, Godard represents the most painful regression of French cinema towards intellectual illiteracy and plastic bluff." - Robert Benayoun, Positif, June 1962

"Here the keynote is not objective truth at all, but truth to a private fantasy world which yet mirrors a real truth about the dreamer and those willing to share his dream. It is not so much what is said as the tone of voice...and here we come back to the central issue of the film, Godard's way with film form. Although undeniably there is an element of deliberate desire to shock in that, too...what strikes one above all is the ease and effectiveness of it all, the readiness with which one can accept these ellipses, the ruthless elimination of routine inessentials. ... Godard knows exactly how much he can safely leave out without losing his audience." - Jon Russell Taylor, Cinema Eye, Cinema Ear (Hill and Wang, 1964)

"Like every important body of work in the canon of modern culture, Godard's films are simply what they are and also events that push their audience to reconsider the meaning and scope of the art form of which they are instances; they're not only works of art, but meta-artistic activities aimed at reorganizing the audience's entire sensibility. Far from deploring the tendency, I believe that the most promising future of films as an art lies in this direction." - Susan Sontag, February 1968

"Modern movies begin here. ... What is most revolutionary about the movie is its headlong pacing, its cool detachment, its dismissal of authority, and the way its narcissistic young heroes are obsessed with themselves and oblivious to the larger society. ... Breathless remains a living movie that retains the power to surprise and involve us after all these years." - Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, July 20, 2003

"Breathless was a kind of documentary about Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg. [Godard's] method was from existing documentary films, which were also breaking ground. He got away with it because it was so deftly done and he had such a smart way of doing it that it held up." - documentary filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker, interviewed on the Criterion Collection DVD of the film

"For those old enough to have cut their teeth on Godard's first effort at messing with French film orthodoxy while blowing an ambivalent kiss to American gangster movies, the movie comes as a thrilling reminder of how playful the master could be even when building a movie around a two-bit car thief and cop killer tooling around Paris, arguing love and existence with his American squeeze as he runs from the police. Perpetually in motion, raffish and cheap in his fedora and ill-fitting jacket, at once majestic and pathetic in his self-aggrandizing identification with Humphrey Bogart, Jean-Paul Belmondo oozes pugnacity to authority and a double-edged promise of seduction and betrayal to Jean Seberg's Patricia, whose angel face will prove to contain its own multitudes." - Ella Taylor, Village Voice, May 25, 2010

"Most of all, it's the beautifully unstrung pop-art poetry of Breathless-its sense of action improvised on the fly, the casual sex and casual cruelty, the movie-love evident in every frame-that marked a decisive break with the past and helped influence a generation of Hollywood mavericks in the 1970s." - Ty Burr, Boston Globe, July 9, 2010

"You could almost choke on all the smoke in this film, but the most visceral effect is that of Belmondo in motion. To me, it's the main reason to see it. Otherwise, Godard's anti-technique makes for a film with no momentum. Historic as it is..., there's nothing so breathless here as its star and his dancerlike beauty. It's too bad Godard didn't linger more on Belmondo's natural ease of movement, because rawness was exactly what the director was after. The film is known for Godard's jump-cuts, the long takes on Paris side streets and the more-or-less improvised dialogue. But with its meandering narrative and slapdash script, the work would scarcely merit attention outside film schools all these years later without Belmondo, his ease of locomotion, the athlete's precision and timing." - Sarah Kaufman, Washington Post, July 9, 2010

by Rob Nixon