Breathless

In popular culture

  • The film is frequently referenced in the Youth in Revolt book series, being a favorite of female protagonist Sheeni Saunders, including her dreams of running off to France and her fascination for Jean-Paul Belmondo.
  • In The Doom Generation, characters play the "smile or I'll choke you" game, and the film's semi-general theme is of a "nihilistic road movie".
  • The Australian band The Death Set named their album from 2011 after main character Michel Poiccard.[40]
  • The final scene is mentioned (and later alluded to visually) in The Squid and the Whale.[41]
  • In the third episode of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, "Android and I", a 35mm reel of this film can be seen on a table, beneath a reel of Alphaville, as Togusa and Batou are investigating the house of a suspect. Other Godard works are also scattered through the scene. Dialog from this film is recited by two other characters throughout the episode. Themes from this episode parallel themes from both this movie and Godard's complete oeuvre. The climax of the episode hinges on the final lines, including one additional line, from the final scene of the film.
  • In an episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Sergeant Jeffords mentions Breathless when the detectives are discussing their favorite cop movies. Jeffords identifies the film as "François Truffaut's Breathless", despite the fact that only the director's name is generally used in such a way. In reference to this error, Jeffords is seen later in the season at a party, defending his statement by saying "film is a writer's medium".
  • In The Dreamers one of the protagonists re-enacts a scene from the film.
  • The final scene is recreated in Romeo Void's "Never Say Never" video.
  • In issue #30 of IDW's ongoing comic book series Transformers: More Than Meets the Eye, Whirl votes for repeat showings of the film during the crew's movie night.
  • The Canadian band The Tragically Hip made a music video for the song "In View" that pays homage to the film.
  • In the 2001 Novel The Incorrigible Optimists Club by Jean-Michel Guenassia, the main character sees the film in the cinema with his family. The theater is empty and the woman working the ticket stand advises against seeing it. Nonetheless, he loves the film.
  • The 2017 Malayalam-language film Mayaanadhi (Mystic River), directed by Ashiq Abu, draws inspiration from Breathless.[42]
  • The 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde contains numerous visual references to Breathless, including an early shot of Warren Beatty wearing a fedora slanted over his eyes and with a match tilted upward held in his lips, echoing Jean-Paul Belmondo's hat and cigarette in the opening scenes of Breathless. Later Beatty also wears a pair of round-rim black sunglasses with one lens missing, an exact visual reference to Belmondo wearing the same sunglasses with a missing lens later in Breathless. Bonnie and Clyde also shares a general storyline with Breathless, involving a handsome, nihilistic young killer who steals cars and who connects with a beautiful, free-spirited young woman. Pauline Kael, in her 1967 review of Bonnie and Clyde in The New Yorker, wrote that "If this way of holding more than one attitude toward life is already familiar to us—if we recognize the make-believe robbers whose toy guns produce real blood, and the Keystone cops who shoot them dead, from Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player and Godard’s gangster pictures, Breathless and Band of Outsiders—it’s because the young French directors discovered the poetry of crime in American life (from our movies) and showed the Americans how to put it on the screen in a new, 'existential' way."
  • In A Very Secret Service, the characters go to see Breathless in a movie theater, and are shown watching the iconic final scene.
  • In The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, fictional actress Evelyn Hugo, at a low point in her career, watches Breathless and is inspired to go to Paris to revive her career.

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