No wonder Jean-Luc Godard called it A Bout de Souffle (Breathless)—the characters stop running only to start talking and their talking is a logorrhoea of caprice, probing and self-defence. Superficially it is a study of a lost generation; but generations are never lost without good reason, and the film is not an account of motives and causes (if it were it would be a criminological case-history) but a study in sensibility. Its nearest equivalent in English literature is Henry James to whose elephantine precision, hesitations and self-consciousness in the pursuit of obscure yet vaguely huge soul-states it approximates by the flippant paradox, the pun and the non sequitur. If Henry James in search of clarifications seems to pant like a bloodhound pursuing its own tail, the hero of A Bout de Souffle has abandoned the vicious circles of self-analysis for the shrug, the droop or jut of...