With a story by Truffaut, Godard's debut feature is his most
conventional - it even has a story. But you can see the roots of all the
experimentation to come in the way he films the romance between
Belmondo's Bogart-worshipping car thief and the American girl who
won't commit to him (Seberg). Raoul Coutard's handheld camera makes
Paris seem the coolest place on earth - and with the jazzy editing, full
of once-jarring jump cuts that now feel as normal as MTV, Godard
overhauled cinema's grammar as radically as anyone since Eisenstein.
And he hadn't even started yet.
