New Order: Favorite Films, 20-1
Miguel Penabella | 14 March 2013
No introduction necessary. Here’s 20 to 1.
020. Synecdoche, New York | Charlie Kaufman | 2008
Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Adaptation are merely warm-ups for the mystifying convolution of Synecdoche, New York. Kaufman takes his archetypical interests – duality, doppelgangers, metacinema, performance, metaphysics – and unleashes an unhinged exercise in artistic expression. Like Adaptation, Kaufman explores the warped mind of the artist in standstill through the eyes of the neurotic Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Taking Adaptation’s story-within-a-story setup, Synecdoche complicates this metacinematic formula by introducing doppelgangers and meta-metacinematic storytelling that plunges even deeper into Cotard’s mind. Kaufman’s talented cast miraculously juggles the mind-bending intricacies of its plot, including the likes of the aforementioned Hoffman, Samantha Morton, Catherine Keener, Tom Noonan, Emily Watson, Hope Davis, Michelle Williams, and so on. The metaphysical simulacrum of reality at play here unfolds so naturally and effortlessly that it’s no wonder why critics hold Charlie Kaufman in such high regard. There’s really nothing else like it.
019. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans | F.W. Murnau | 1927
My appreciation for silent cinema leaves a lot to be desired, but I’m desperately improving. Out of all the silent classics revered by the cinema community, F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans remains my uncontested favorite. Murnau presents a tumultuous marriage under pressure from a duplicitous tantalizer, and what would be a formulaic melodrama ruined by the conventions of love triangle plotting ultimately becomes a meditative glimpse at the struggles and joys of life. Eschewing a straightforward conflict with the seductress, Murnau places his married couple in the bustling realm of the city only for the pair to gradually fall back into love. Sunrise thus presents a welcoming tale of love rekindled, complete with the fragilities and insecurities of a relationship tested by time. Murnau tells his story minimally, emphasizing mood and pacing to deepen the emotions at the crux of his lover’s relationship. Representations of romance in films have been extremely well executed since then (Blue Valentine, Tokyo Story, Before Sunrise), and Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans marks an already well-established foundation for these and many more films to come.
018. Branded to Kill | Seijun Suzuki | 1967
Loosely held together with elliptical fragments of storytelling, Seijun Suzuki unravels his weird tale of rival hitmen with an eye for the abstract. Drawing on the style of the French New Wave, Suzuki fills his film with lively jump cuts that often cut away before a character can even finish their thoughts. Restlessness pervades the entire experience, making for a breezy and brisk film that bubbles with reckless energy. Branded to Kill follows an eccentric, narcissistic hitman with an obsessive neurosis over a bizarre hitman ranking system (No More Heroes and Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai would draw heavily from this film), gunning for that number one spot amongst other equally ostentatious competitors. Suzuki’s rash editing renders a lot of the dialogue as non-sequitur, transforming Branded to Kill’s premise into an absurdist exercise in vagueness. In lieu of narrative complexity, Suzuki focuses solely on capturing the essence of the period with lavish stylization – James Bond-esque sex, cars, guns, drinks, jazz, black and white cinematography, and boiling rice. Suzuki does to hitmen what Kurosawa does to samurai, mythologizing them to the point of pop art; it’s a wonder to watch.
017. Minnie and Moskowitz | John Cassavetes | 1971
About half an hour into the film: “You know, I think that movies are a conspiracy… because they set you up. They set you up from the time you’re a little kid. They set you up to believe in everything – in ideals and strength and good guys and romance, and of course, love. So you go out, you start looking. Doesn’t happen, you keep looking. You get a job and you spend a lot of time fixing up things – your apartment and jazz. And you learn how to be feminine – you know, “feminine?” You learn how to cook, but there’s no Charles Boyer in my life. I never even met a Charles Boyer. I never met Clark Gable. I never met Humphrey Bogart. I mean, they don’t exist – that’s the truth. But the movies set you up and no matter how bright you are, you believe it.”
John Cassavetes takes this idea and cross-examines it throughout his entire career. For Cassavetes, the distinction between reality and cinema distorts into a hybrid world of trickery. His actors inhabit their roles with full authenticity and the director films in a vérité style as if to undermine his artifice altogether. Minnie and Moskowitz places this tension between reality and cinema at its core, and the things at stake here – love, trust, hope – all but transcend this struggle.
016. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind | Michel Gondry | 2004
Synecdoche, New York may be Charlie Kaufman’s masterpiece, but his stint with Michel Gondry for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind witnesses the enigmatic screenwriter engaging with the knotty pitfalls of romance and despair. The film allows Kaufman to tease out complex emotions following the taciturn absurdism of Being John Malkovich and Adaptation; this emotional weightiness in part stems from career-defining performances from a resonant Jim Carrey and a down-to-earth Kate Winslet. Kaufman channels the work of Woody Allen’s Annie Hall in his exploration of memory and budding romance, and the film remains just as emotionally mature and levelheaded enough to reverberate with striking insightfulness. Gondry’s eccentric mastery of mise-en-scène works phenomenally when paired with Kaufman’s charged script, conveying the desperation of memory loss with set design, costuming, and lighting. Eternal Sunshine is strangely both a melancholic and exuberant film, and it demands multiple viewings to fully convey its shrewd genius.
015. 8½ | Federico Fellini | 1963
Federico Fellini’s metanarrative of an artist’s inner psyche humanizes the monolithic status of the famed Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni) by laying bare the man’s ego and neurosis for all to see. 8½ journeys deep into the unconscious workings of the imagination, probing the artist’s mind via dreams and the unstable nature of memory. The film both anticipates the work of pop culture deconstructionists like Charlie Kaufman, but Fellini’s agenda remains playful and sensual enough to tread the realm of a Woody Allen flick. Fellini explores nagging ideas at the core of Guido’s head, ranging everywhere from religion to family life. Everything revolves around Fellini’s singular artist, and so even as his masterpiece and home life breaks down and revitalizes, we’re still lost amidst Guido’s fleeting thoughts in one euphoric imagination.
014. Brazil | Terry Gilliam | 1985
The comic vision of Orwellian dystopia in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil feels natural: simply take the absurdist humor of Monty Python and assimilate it into a futurist envisioning of the world. Brazil’s many quirks – ducts, magnified screens, plastic surgery – produce a rich and colorful dystopian society that violently clashes with the dark underbelly at the heart of it all. Gilliam slowly teases out the sinister quality of Brazil with a smile, rendering its big reveal all the more devastating. An often-overlooked sci-fi masterpiece, Brazil stands the test of time as one of the funniest sci-fi works ever produced and its absurdist sensibilities (see: an unexpected Odessa steps homage) seem like a natural reaction to the absurd society that Gilliam presents. Nevertheless, what Gilliam offers resonates with full force in a modern world mired with political and social discord. Brazil’s social commentary is simply tied to visual gags and offbeat humor that audiences often overlook, and upon repeat viewings, the density of Gilliam’s project slowly reveals itself. Undoubtedly Terry Gilliam’s magnum opus, Brazil endures as one of the strangest products of the 1980s, and yet its brazen mélange of dystopia and fantasy remains cynically hilarious today as it did back in 1985.
013. There Will Be Blood | Paul Thomas Anderson | 2007
Paul Thomas Anderson forges a compelling character study for the modern times, a monumental powerhouse of storytelling that will likely stand tall amongst the Charles Foster Kanes and the Vito Corleones of the cinematic world. Following the demonic oilman Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), PTA’s avoidance of his typical Robert Altman-inspired ensemble casts in favor of a singular character drama places him in the realm of Kubrickian cinema. The gorgeous one-point perspectives and the fanatical exploits of his characters certainly evoke the crazed characters of Kubrick’s past (see: The Shining), but PTA masterfully weaves his own unique tale of corrupted Manifest Destiny and unrestrained capitalism. There Will Be Blood triumphs with the monumental performances from Daniel-Day Lewis at the top of his game and a bravado stint from a fiery Paul Dano, both actors thundering and bellowing like angry colossi. Tensions build throughout the film, and the savage epilogue fast-forwards into a crumbling, chilly mansion that witnesses one of the most striking conclusions in recent memory. It’s haunting stuff.
012. Paris, Texas | Wim Wenders | 1984
Wim Wenders directs a film so fundamentally tied to the mythology of the modern American landscape that no other American filmmaker has been able to fully replicate its poignant foresight. Paris, Texas is a meditative film full of secrets as mysterious as the American Southwest and the rolling hills of California that Wenders captures on film. It’s a story about hidden memory and the passing of time, and a screening of home videos midway through the film permits buried emotions to rise to the surface. Wim Wenders directs the near mute Harry Dean Stanton to concoct one of the most transfixing character studies of the 1980s, examining the nature of reconnection and human emotions with a careful eye for beauty and great sadness. The visual landscapes that comprise the film – from the arid horizons of a vanishing American desert to the neon skylines of urban Texas – carry a sense of wistful longing all on their own, and Paris, Texas channels the emotions of a forgotten Americana into Harry Dean Stanton’s own devastating ten minute monologue towards the end of the film. Paris, Texas films characters getting lost and staying lost, turning men into myth and emotions into buried remnants of memory, forever lost in time.
011. Mulholland Drive | David Lynch | 2001
Everything that has come to define the style of David Lynch coalesces in Mulholland Drive, the sprawling, cryptic work of an artist in full form. Lynch takes the sunny, innocuous sanguinity of an idealized vision of stardom and pairs it with the nightmarish underbelly of something sinister lying around the corner. Mulholland Drive floats through unconsciousness with style, crafting memorable moments that can startle and amuse with equal measure. Naomi Watts delivers a groundbreaking performance as a character as duplicitous as the hokey smiles of those in Twin Peaks. David Lynch’s digital cinematography fundamentally validates the worth of this budding video technology as a means to convey an experimental aesthetic that engages in our perception of illusory images. Hollywood as a netherworld of parlor tricks and smoke-and-mirrors deception has never been so surreally dreamlike.
010. Seven Samurai | Akira Kurosawa | 1954
The influence of Seven Samurai resounds in everything as obvious as 13 Assassins to something as offbeat as A Bug’s Life. Akira Kurosawa’s epic story exhibits the full resolve of the human will, tracing delicate emotions and concluding with a relentless flurry of action in his three-hour masterpiece. But before Seven Samurai reaches its cathartic conclusion, Kurosawa takes his time with a good hour of exposition. The film chronicles a band of wayfaring, philosophizing ronin tinged with Marxist underpinnings and fueled by a daily bowl of rice from impoverished farmers straight out of Russian literature. Kurosawa’s samurai are a dejected bunch, fighting not for honor or valor but for daily sustenance; the magic of Seven Samurai lies in how Kurosawa teases out true heroism when his warriors stop thinking only of their own ego but for the rights of the underprivileged and the poor. Indeed, the film’s extended stay simply welcoming and developing its titular samurai allows flexible room to grow. Toshiro Mifune is a livewire act as always, and the sheer emotional weightiness of Kurosawa’s maturing warriors and his emotionally charged story permits the first two hours of build-up to pass with ease. When the furious rainstorm hits and the final showdown commences, the desperation of Kurosawa’s seven samurai feels extraordinarily palpable. One can’t help but get the feeling that these saturnine warriors fight not only for the village they’re sworn to protect but also for the memory of a way of life already long gone.
009. Lost in Translation | Sofia Coppola | 2003
Nobody does modern ennui like Sofia Coppola; her characters drift aimlessly yet graciously through cinematic space, leisurely floating towards a discreet sense of catharsis. Lost in Translation captures the fleeting moments of melancholic isolation with a loving sense of mise-en-scène, employing both a shallow focus lens and soft lighting to elevate the intimacy of her scenes. Coppola separates the lofty hideaway of the Park Hyatt Hotel and the crazed streets of Tokyo below, and in doing so replicates the comfortable world of the internal psyche and the external environment. Lost in Translation’s interiors embrace wearied travellers with open arms, and it’s in this tranquil indoor retreat that the budding friendship between Bob (Bill Murray) and Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) gradually blossoms. Coppola directs Bill Murray with a level of self-awareness, playing on his eccentricities as a self-deprecating, aged comedian with an approach that feels almost autobiographical. Scarlett Johansson’s performance as Charlotte radiates a warm sense of stillness necessary to authentically convey human disconnect. In Bob and Charlotte’s steady gravitation towards one another, Coppola transcends the pitfalls of verbal communication. Lost in Translation’s presentation of human detachment speaks volumes to an entire generation lost amidst the depravity of a hurried modern life, offering in its place a dreamlike meditation on interpersonal connection.
008. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off | John Hughes | 1986
John Hughes breaks all the rules of the teenage film with Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and this cinematic rebellion reflects his titular character’s own rebellious state. We shouldn’t appreciate Ferris Bueller’s cocky, narcissistic attitude and his cemented popularity, but Hughes writes his characters in such a way as to humanize them as endearing and earnest. Hughes denies framing Bueller as antagonistic just because the conventions of the archetypical high school film dictates that popular kids are inherently unlikeable. No, Ferris Bueller is a strongly written, well-defined character who actively sticks up for his friends and pursues anything that interests him – being the star of his own parade, admiring modern art, taking a priceless Ferrari 250 GT out for a joyride – with unashamed enthusiasm. Hughes thus avoids the usual clichés that hold back normal teenage films for something absolutely irresistible as a true cultural milestone – a triumph that he replicates in The Breakfast Club as well. What helps John Hughes’ celebration of the high school years are outstanding performances by a well-rounded cast. Matthew Broderick delivers a career defining performance as the titular character, conveying a guileless charm and effortless likability as one of those folks that everyone was a friend with back in high school. Mia Sara plays the sensitive concern of Sloane Peterson with a delicate touch; Alan Ruck’s outing as the existentially tormented Cameron Frye is a pleasure to watch as he turns from a downer into a headstrong young adult. Ultimately, the incessant amusements of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off yield to the inevitable coming-of-age crises that Hughes’ trio of leads are circumventing: that of the apprehension over the future, and the changeover from high school to college life. And so even as Ferris Bueller and his pals manage to temporarily halt the world-weariness that comes at this stage of their life, one can’t help but fear a greater somber ennui that would come in a film like The Graduate.
007. Taxi Driver | Martin Scorsese | 1976
Martin Scorsese’s unforgettable 1976 masterpiece addresses the topic of violence with the uncompromising resolve of something like A Clockwork Orange, depicting human psychology as inevitably bound to hurtle towards violence when put under pressure. Paul Schrader’s poetically written script clashes with the ferocious imagery that Scorsese delivers, filming a decaying, grungy 1970s glimpse of New York and a character caught in a downward spiral. Taxi Driver pits these two forces together – that of the urban monstrosity itself, along with its political machines and exploitative criminal core against the colossally building fury of Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) – and concludes with one of the most powerful sequences in the history of film. Many have talked about Bickle’s ultimate showdown before, and once Scorsese’s color gradient softens to a toned-down scheme, Taxi Driver erupts in cathartic horror. More importantly, the scene that follows ultimately ends up being the more subtly jarring dénouement of events, a complete about-face that betrays the unreality of its conclusion. Scorsese returns to the charming, passive version of Travis Bickle as he drives home the angelic Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), only for his final seconds of footage to collapse under the instability of the human psyche. Bickle sees his reflection in a catastrophic moment of self-reflexivity, the music distorts, and the credits roll. It’s only when we’re treated with the lovely credits sequence set to the moody saxophone of Bernard Herrmann that Scorsese complicates Taxi Driver one final time, when the face of Travis Bickle momentarily reappears for a brief split second in the credits. The open-endedness that surrounds this finale only deepens my appreciation for the film even more.
006. Oldboy | Park Chan-wook | 2003
Park Chan-wook understands the fundamentals of Greek tragedy, channeling Oedipus Rex in how he elicits a sense of pity and fear while simultaneously upturning his original endeavors of what would be a simple revenge flick. Chronicling the trials and tribulations of the tormented Oh Dae-su (an always phenomenal Choi Min-sik), Chan-wook ultimately subverts his genre formulae and renders every single character as one to be pitied, and the finale proves devastatingly tragic. Amongst the other great contemporary Korean directors working today – Bong Joon-ho, Kim Ji-woon, Lee Chang-dong – Park Chan-wook approaches the topic of violence with a painterly sensibility, sketching out broad, expressive strokes that charges each and every scene with emotion. His command of mise-en-scène contributes to an aesthetically stunning (if sometimes repulsive) film, and in combining elements of melodrama and the revenge flick, he informs audiences how to experience his unflinching violence. Oldboy addresses a number of contemporary national issues everywhere from surveillance to the modern growth of South Korea and the things lost amongst this growth (memory, for one thing), and Park Chan-wook’s intricately woven revenge tragedy represents a finely tuned exercise in dramatic stylization.
005. Solaris | Andrei Tarkovsky | 1972
Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris induces a particular kind of cryptic, space-set odyssey that simultaneously draws from and heavily departs from Stanley Kubrick’s groundbreaking 1968 classic. Like 2001, Solaris meshes arthouse surrealism with the familiar images of sci-fi, inspiring a dialogue between the whacked-out interstellar overdrives of the 1970s and the grander tradition of film art. Tarkovsky’s 1972 film continues his ethereal sense of meditativeness and spiritual restlessness, allowing his camera to gently float through his forsaken spacecraft like a ghost. His cosmonauts descend into the bleakest voids of the unconscious, and it’s in this altered state of being that Tarkovsky enters into a discourse of spiritual metaphysics, the fickle nature of memory, and time and space itself. Solaris confronts the limitations of our human understanding of love, reality, and identity, and in the context of Soviet communism, Tarkovsky’s artistic endeavors here are revelatory. Moreover, Solaris generates extraordinary cinematic imagery that will last the test of time, from the extended sequence in a future Japan to the remastered Criterion edition’s interchange between color and violet-tinted cinematography. These richly defined visuals contrast with Tarkovsky’s incredibly cryptic visions, and the milky glimpses of outer space mirror the psychological opaqueness of the entire journey, ultimately lulling you into a hypnotized state. Solaris is frequently analyzed in the context of Steven Soderbergh’s curious remake in 2002, and while both retain their own individual strengths (they are vastly different beasts), Andrei Tarkovsky prefers to withdraw inward while his boundless space setting turns outward towards the stars.
004. Pulp Fiction | Quentin Tarantino | 1994
The simple, guilty pleasures of Pulp Fiction rely on how a young Quentin Tarantino engages his audience, assuming that they are acquainted with the language of cinema. Pulp Fiction features high stylization with lowbrow inspirations, and it’s in Tarantino’s constant citations that reveal a work of cinematic depth deeply enmeshed in the formative qualities of 1990s American independent filmmaking. Tarantino excavates the value of B-movies, exploitation films, and grindhouse as the filmmakers of the French New Wave did in the 1960s, and his appropriation of overlooked movies retains a playful touch of new wave sensibilities and knowing B-movie camp. In this sense, Pulp Fiction occupies a role as postmodern pastiche with the budding director’s imagination pouring out a strange vision of Los Angeles informed by works of the past. As a result, we’re catered with an overabundance of some of the most memorable images of the movies: bad motherfuckers, royale with cheese, a pocket watch’s journey, overdose mishaps, accidental deaths, a modern day Bonnie and Clyde, and the efficiency of a certain wolf. Upon repeat viewings, one can uncover the even subtler witticisms and cinematic puns that operate underneath the surface level narrative: a flock of seagulls, Tony Rocky Horror, Martin and Lewis or Amos and Andy, garcon means boy. All of these allusions combine in producing a sharply written and tremendously fun moviegoing experience despite the film’s extremely long running time. It’s a wax museum with a pulse rate.
003. The Thin Red Line | Terrence Malick | 1998
Terrence Malick’s contemplative commentary on how war consigns all men into one, indefinite being conveys this forlorn sentiment with an extraordinary sense of natural beauty, as if nature will endure despite humanity’s shortcomings. Shadows fall upon the faces of Malick’s enormous ensemble cast, rendering each and every individual soldier completely inhuman, and yet The Thin Red Line avoids succumbing to the trappings of an ugly and gritty war film. John Toll’s stunning cinematography prefers to show its limbless, bloody dead amongst the verdant rainforest grasses and floating butterflies in peaceful serenity – a visually arresting, revelatory juxtaposition. Malick’s first film in twenty years since 1978’s Days of Heaven, the sagacious auteur reintroduces and tinkers with a number of filmic elements that will define his entire career: ethereal snatches of voiceover narration, gliding camera movements, dialogue inspired directly by transcendentalism, philosophical musings, and a great love of naturalism and natural lighting. And yet despite the loveliness of Malick’s imagery and philosophizing, The Thin Red Line still inhabits an ugly subject matter on a conceptual level, and the resigned, aimless faces of his soldiers betray the melancholy underneath it all. The soldiers on Guadalcanal may fight as one unified whole, but Malick presents his vision of warfare in such a way that these men could never be any more distant from one another than that given moment, each and together fighting their own private wars.
002. 2001: A Space Odyssey | Stanley Kubrick | 1968
What can I write about 2001: A Space Odyssey that hasn’t already been said before? The film remains a masterpiece not only in science fiction, but also as a monumental work of cinema. Stanley Kubrick explores themes in philosophy, religion, science, metanarrative, technology, and the human identity in a densely packed yet aesthetically calculated work of art. Everything from the godlike presence of the obelisk to the Genesis allegory of David (playing as God here) punishing HAL-9000 for its rebellion (playing as Adam and Eve) carries such a multifarious quality that interpretation will likely continue on for decades. The film also explores elements of metacinema in how Kubrick collapses our sense of space with his zero gravity sequences, rendering spatial relations completely indefinite and dreamlike. Characters move through space in an exaggeratedly slow manner, almost like wading through the layers of a dream. A later shot of Frank violently thrashing through the empty void of space is surreally spellbinding. On top of this spatial estrangement, Kubrick goes on to abstract the cinematic nature of time in the film’s concluding segment. Time becomes opaque, spontaneously accelerating and stopping to the point where 2001: A Space Odyssey ceases to resemble anything like a prototypical film and more like a work of a mad genius tinkering with form and content. And yet what would be a completely disillusioning film still proves to be a satisfying work of euphoric beauty. Stanley Kubrick meshes the beautiful and the grim into one unified whole, choreographing nuclear weapons to the graceful notes of The Blue Danube Waltz or juxtaposing the Nietzschean void of HAL-9000 to the trippy lights and colors of the stargate sequence. Even if you don’t completely understand the workings of 2001 upon first glance, the sheer ambition and scope of the film ought to be sufficient in a mesmerizing cinematic experience.
001. Breathless | Jean-Luc Godard | 1960
Breathless has a legacy as one of the defining early French New Wave films that completely revamped the cinema. Focusing on the burgeoning postwar youth culture, Godard channels this raw and untapped energy with aplomb. Running at a scrubby 90 minutes, the film feels seemingly innocuous, but this short duration lends Godard enough time to completely overturn the status quo of traditional filmmaking. Breathless is playful in its editing practices, with its now famous jump cuts conveying the spontaneity and impulsiveness of youth culture with an unparalleled honesty. This spontaneity extends to Godard’s on-location, guerilla-style method of shooting footage with a shaky handheld, blurring the lines between cinematic artifice and where reality begins. The lack of a script renders his duo of actors Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo completely unprepared, but Breathless turns this unpreparedness into a triumph of ad-libbed jubilance with authentic, in-the-moment emotions. Godard interrogates the tropes and conventions of classical cinema by appropriating the language of Hollywood crime films and upends these tropes as silly (albeit joyous). Breathless rebuilds cinema anew even as it pays great tribute to the films of American past (here’s looking at you, Bogart), but in breaking all the conventions of cinema, new ones emerged. What we come to love with modern cinema owes greatly to the storytelling and directorial techniques that Godard presents here, everyone and anyone from Steven Soderbergh to Michael Haneke.
On top of its lasting importance as an essential slice of new wave cinema, Breathless is also an undyingly rapturous film. The extended apartment sequence in the middle of Godard’s decimation of the gangster genre materializes out of nowhere, as if dislocated from a love story in another film altogether. The innocuous tomfoolery of the couple in the confined space of the apartment transcends the initial claustrophobia of the scene – their relationship feels boundless, and what Godard does in this scene uncovers the iconoclasm inherent to the film. Jean-Paul Belmondo’s Michel Poiccard may prove a bit rough around the edges, but he radiates an effortless cool and confidence while swaggering about the streets of Paris with his weightless gait. He may be a womanizer, but Godard’s loving close-ups makes him seem charming. Jean Seberg’s lovely Patricia Franchini embodies a young Paris, her black and white striped top now synonymous with French style. She’s well read, intelligent, and has a taste for art, but like Poiccard, she also comes with her share of blemishes. She’s naïve and falls with the wrong crowd – imperfect people in a perfect world. Godard amorously films this world of 1960s Paris with the gleaming Citroëns and the tree-lined boutiques and cinemas of Champs-Élysées, lights sparkling in the dark. His jump cuts convey the youthful restlessness that makes the picture lively and sprightly, always an ease to watch with its breezy 90 minutes. It gives rise to Godard’s later pictures like A Woman Is a Woman (he hadn’t found his perfect muse Anna Karina just yet) and Pierrot le Fou, but even after all these years it’s always been Godard’s first film that’s left me à bout de souffle.