Metropolis was already a classic when Jean-Luc Godard made Breathless, in 1959. Godard would actually go on to cast Fritz Lang as himself—playing a frustrated movie director, quashed by the industry—in Contempt, a few years later. But Breathless, back for a very limited engagement, was one of the kickoffs of the French New Wave; and, boy, it’s a kick in the vitals—Metropolis feels like a museum piece, Breathless like it was made last week.

They say it’s the 50th anniversary of this, Godard’s first feature-length film, but I don’t believe ’em. For a youth movement, the nouvelle vague has aged strikingly well; sci-fi blockbusters, reissued with upgraded F/X, seem like Joan Rivers jobs by comparison. (This restoration was supervised by the original cinematographer, Raoul Coutard; it’s luminous. Considering the movie’s reputation for improvisation and innovation—deserved though it is—I’m in awe, this time around, of the filmmakers’ assured craftsmanship. But—forgive me—it’s still, by impulse, to movies what the punk movement was to the mainstream rock of its day.) Godard, already an old soul at age 29, had uncorked the fountain of mass-culture youth. One of the director’s early stateside champions, Pauline Kael, wrote that the young hero of Breathless is “romantic in a modern sense because he doesn’t care about anything but the pleasures of love and fast cars.” Not quite. Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is romantic in a modern sense because he’d rather die a movie hero than live as a human being. He apes a picture of Humphrey Bogart’s impassive mug as if fawning over his own reflection. If all the world’s a stage, then this hedonist thinks he’s the leading man. Michel, the romantic, wants to bring the house down; but it ends up falling on him.

Generally, the most fascinating movies are made by artists in conflict with themselves. Lang was of two minds about technology; Godard’s heart is torn by pop culture. Breathless is dedicated to Monogram Pictures, once an exponent of lurid thrillers that were alimentary to the director’s imagination. But he makes Michel shallow because the character’s frame of reference—cheap American fantasy—is shallow. In a panic, Michel takes out a police officer, but his fear subsides as soon as the deed is done. He decides to book it to Italy with his girlfriend Patricia (Jean Seberg), but doesn’t object to dallying around her Paris lodgings, looking for a lay. Godard, in a telling cameo, rats out his hero to the cops. But it’s Patricia, who’s bored with this diversion and game to begin a fresh one, who effectively sells out her hood. Michel, alas, doesn’t make it to prison. To paraphrase the showman’s eulogy of old King Kong: It wasn’t the bullets; it’s movies that killed the beast. These lovebirds aren’t malicious; they’re merely oblivious to everyone else. So it’s hardly coincidental that our femme fatale is an American.

But Breathless is no naggy condemnation of movies, and even less of movie lovers. It is, instead, the first, most immediate collision of the world outside and life onscreen; the first, or the first recognized, example of an artist’s personal voice and experience rhapsodizing under the breath of a commercial-film genre. The historical period in which it was made, so elegiacally stylized in A Single Man and beautifully rendered in An Education, is vividly revived here—so tensely present that immortality seems not just possible but proven. Rather than nail this butterfly’s wings to their historical context, go back and analyze its cocoon, or study the eggs this fertile caper hatched, I’ll just say that the film’s both an enrapturing character study and a furtively insouciant comedy, and that it may be the chillest, illest, coolest, chicest movie ever made, I don’t care what you think, it is.