Around the same time critics were wringing their hands over the audacity of remaking The Thing (from Another World) or Cat People and sequelizing Psycho II, another film drew more outrage than those two combined: Breathless, the first mainstream film from director Jim McBride (David Holzman's Diary, Glen and Randa, The Big Easy) and a neon-soaked, stylized sort-of-remake of the Jean-Luc Godard classic. A sexed-up joyride with a sensibility lifted from comic books (called out explicitly with frequent Silver Surfer appearances) and American rock 'n' roll, the film took a while to find its audience on home video after the pop culture-drenched screenplay by McBride and L.M. Kit Carson left many viewers and especially critics scratching their heads.

While zooming through the desert to L.A. in a stolen car listening to Jerry Lee Lewis and planning to whisk away the girl of his dreams to Mexico, small-time Las Vegas car thief Jesse Lujack (Gere) gets in over his head when a cop pulls him over and gets shot when Jesse uncovers a pistol in the vehicle. Finally arriving in Los Angeles, Jesse scrambles to get paid for a previous job and doggedly pursues the object of his affections: Monica (Kaprisky), a French architecture student he met during a memorable Vegas weekend. With the law closing in, Jesse and Monica ignite a full-scale romance as he tries to convince her to come with him south of the border.

Though it follows the basics of the French classic, this radical riff on Breathless has a completely different attitude complete with vivid plashes of color (especially red), a rockabilly-infused soundtrack, and appealing performances by the two leads with Gere (right in between An Officer and a Gentleman and The Cotton Club but very much amping up his live-wire attitude from Looking for Mr. Goodbar) at his most grandiose playing nicely opposite the smoldering Kaprisky, known to VHS fans for the insane softcore epic Aphrodite and later films like Andzej Zulawski's La femme publique and the nude beach extravaganza L'Année des méduses. Many critics over the years have taken the film to task for its unabashed nude scenes involving Kaprisky (including a particularly ridiculous review from Slant), somehow oblivious to the fact that Gere is equally sexualized and undressed throughout. The film definitely fits well within the vivid, scuzzy strain of '80s L.A. neo-noir films around the same time like Body Double, To Live and Die in L.A., and 52 Pick-Up, even if this is far less violent by comparison. Apparently McBride enjoyed playing in the noir sandbox, too, since he followed this up with his biggest hit, The Big Easy, and returned to Jerry Lee Lewis again with the sanitized biopic Great Balls of Fire!

Initially released in theater by Orion, Breathless first hit VHS from Vestron but has long been the property of MGM including a full frame DVD in 2001 (with only the trailer as an extra). Shout! Factory bowed it on Blu-ray in 2015, featuring a 1.85:1 presentation and again just the trailer. The 2023 Blu-ray from Fun City Editions finally gave the film the special edition it deserved, featuring a fresh 2K scan from the 35mm interpositive. The framing of this film has varied over the years; the DVD featured some extra room at the top and bottom but lost quite a bit on the sides, while the Shout! Factory disc was an okay release at the time with the 1.85:1 framing looking fine throughout while losing a bit of nudity viewers had grown accustomed to seeing over the years on cable, VHS, and DVD. The a/v presentation here looks great with the snappy DTS-HD MA English 2.0 mono track sounding solid. (It's a real shame Orion didn't spring for a Dolby Stereo mix for this one as it really would have killed.) English SDH subtitles are also provided. In addition you get an isolated DTS-HD MA 2.0 mono music track, which is fascinating for the way it allows you to study how the songs are mingled with the sparse but interesting score by Jack Nitzsche. McBride appears here for a quick 27s video intro and a 31m8s interview covering his entry into filmmaking, the "known quantity" factor that led him to choose Breathless as a project, the casting process (which included approaching Robert De Niro and a move from Universal to Orion), the brief period when Franc Roddam was assigned to direct instead, and the actual production process. Critic Glenn Kenny delivers a thorough new audio commentary balancing film analysis of the recurring visual motifs and pop culture nods with facts about Orion, the original film, and all the major players here; there's barely a moment to breathe here, and it's a very solid listen. Also included are two deleted scenes (1m30s and 4m26s), which have no surviving audio but come with optional McBride commentary to fill you in; the one with the flaming palm tree is actually quite striking and could've been a nice visual flourish in the final product. Most interesting here is an alternate ending (3m57s), which is shorter than you'd think given it comes with a lengthy text intro and the end credits; basically it extends the action a little longer to show what happens after the freeze frame in the final version. They definitely made the right call ending the film where they did as this option doesn't really work, but it does have a really nice piece of Nitzsche music you can also hear as an isolated option. McBride delivers another bit of brief commentary here, too, explaining all the grappling over how to wrap up the film on just the right note. Finally the disc wraps up with the trailer and a 2m57s gallery, while the insert booklet comes with new essays by Margaret Barton-Fumo, deftly tackling the film's dense and complicated soundtrack music assemblage, and Cristina Cacioppo, who appraises the film's attributes from its use of L.A. locations to its cinephile adoption of French New Wave and classic noir predecessors. U.K. audiences also got their own Blu-ray option from Second Sight in 2018, featuring some framing variations in the scan (from an older master), a Valerie Kaprisky interview, and a Mark Kermode appraisal.

In a remarkably short turnaround, Breathless hopped over to Vinegar Syndrome imprint Cinématographe in 2025 for a two-disc UHD and Blu-ray edition featuring a new 4K scan from the original camera negative (with HDR-compatible Dolby Vision bringing out some nice additional intensity and gradations in the reds in particular). Detail tightens up throughout and framing is identical to the Fun City disc, while the DTS-HD MA 2.0 English mono still sounds excellent and features optional English SDH subtitles. The isolated score is ported over here, and this time you get two new commentaries starting with one featuring McBride and the label's Justin LaLiberty. It's a subdued track but a worthwhile one as McBride delivers memories about the shoot, barely noting the Godard film and instead focusing on the creation of the soundtrack, the shooting logistics, juggling his home life with the production at the time, and getting the cast into the right groove. A second track with film writer Travis Woods is, perhaps appropriately, extremely breathless and at the opposite end of the energy spectrum as he dives into the plentiful pop culture references from the Silver Surfer to Gun Crazy, the obvious influence on Tarantino, the role of rockabilly, the relationship to Godard's film, '80s remakes in general, and tons more. Ported over here are the deleted scenes (with McBride commentary), the alternate ending (with optional commentary), and the trailer. The new McBride interview "Rock N Roll as an Attitude" (23m35s) covers his first exposure to the Godard film, the process of acquiring the rights to the remake and the trepidation that entailed, and his career in Hollywood after cutting his teeth on indie features that honed his artistic voice. In "A Different Perspective" (15m4s), casting director Jane Jenkins looks back at the film industry at the time in the wake of American Zoetrope's collapse, the process of casting the role that went to Kaprisky including the challenges of the French language, and numerous other actors who auditioned for the film but didn't make the cut. Finally the video essay "To Ensnare Is to Enshrine: The Ghostly Layers of Jim McBride's Breathless" (10m31s) by Daniel Kremer analyzes the dialogue between American and French cinema taking place with the low and high culture of the past being claimed and resampled into a new kind of cinematic world. Also included in the usual deluxe packaging is a booklet featuring worthwhile essays by LaLiberty ("Business and Pleasure: The Neo-Noir Cinema of Jim McBride"), Justine Peres Smith ("I Don't Know If I'm Unhappy Because Not Free or Not Free Because I'm Unhappy"), and Kristen Yoonsoo Kim ("Breathless '83: Don't Call It a Remake"), plus a reproduction of the pressbook's production notes.

Cinématographe (Blu-ray)

Fun City Editions (Blu-ray)

Shout! Factory (Blu-ray)

MGM (DVD)

Updated review on June 11, 2025