10 Groundbreaking Films That Are Actually Terrible

Jean-Luc Godard is one of the most influential and important writer/directors in cinema: an icon in the industry whose contributions to the French New Wave have rippled out across the world. You can argue that he’s the wellspring from which our modern understanding of film editing gushes forth, if you want to be fancy about it.

Breathless, his first feature-length project, is the story of a criminal and the girlfriend he hides with while on the run for killing a cop. Its influence can’t be underestimated: it’s been the precursor for so many sophisticated crime dramas over the intervening sixty years that to excise it would leave the history of film with more holes than a fishing net.

And it’s a woeful film. Strip away the influence, the hype, the cool and you’ve got an outlaw country song updated for French hipsters. That’s a three-minute song about a boy and his fifteen minutes of fame, but it’s not a narrative worth ninety minutes of anyone’s time.

Godard’s reinterpretation of structure in shooting a script helped to bust myths about what could and couldn’t be done in cinema… but it makes for a dreary, formless film, all style and no substance, as shallow as a puddle.

The one thing that made Breathless compulsive viewing was its radical nature, but this is 2020, and we see a little clearer now. Sixty years on, it’s not new or exciting, and what’s left isn’t remotely interesting and has nothing to say.