'Breathless' on Bastille Day (Gangsta Flick With Subtitles)

Is it any wonder I'm a Francophile? When I was 6, my parents took us on a family vacation to Paris, where one of my aunts was living in a flat with her then boyfriend, a long-haired Frenchman in blue-and-yellow Adidas, who's now her husband.

Who needed the Grand Canyon or Yellowstone, right?

The hotel we stayed in had a balcony overlooking a narrow street, and I remember the furnishings being velvety red. Every morning, like clockwork, a staffer came with what I can only call hot cocoa (but really doesn't do it justice), croissants, soft butter and various preserves.

We walked the Champs, visited the Eiffel Tower, and several majestic churches. There are pictures of me with chunky sneakers on and sweaters tied Preppy Handbook-style around my shoulders: I'm cheesing! So I guess the love affair started on that trip.

I tend to gravitate to all things Gallic and with Sunday being Bastille Day, I celebrated with a first-time screening of Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless sponsored by the Museum of the Moving Image (and MAD), as part of the series French New Wave Essentials.

You know it's 1959 because Jean Seberg's Patricia has an internship at a Newspaper, The New York Herald Tribune, which she hawks in the evenings on the streets of Paris. When asked by her petty-thug boyfriend, Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo), why she likes being a writer, she says, because "I make money and I'm free."

Patricia is an American student, in France as well to attend classes at the Sorbonne and she gets wrapped up with her BF, not realizing he's on the lam for shooting a cop.

But what makes this b/w 90-minute flick essential is the dialogue (Godard was a respected film critic before he tried his hand at filmmaking; co-writer Francois Truffaut devised the concept) and the radical use of the jump cut.

You keep thinking you've missed something when in fact, Godard and his cinematographer have deliberately removed footage in the editing process.

In one scene, Patricia meets up with a journalist from the Tribune for drinks in Montparnasse. He's promised to assign her stories, and he does. But why is she on a park bench making out with him a few hours later? [Laughs] A buss for a byline, I guess.