¶ … watch first the French a Bout de Souffle, Luc Godard's film, released in 1960. I decided to pick this particular one from the list because I thought the image of Jean Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg in the street made me want to see the film. That image communicated not only eroticism, but also a special connection between the two that I wanted to explore. While watching the French film, I searched the Internet to find out more about the actress playing Patricia, the main female role. I found her femininity befitting the sensuality of her male counterpart, Paris in the sixties. Next, I then found out that Jean Paul Belondo played his first major role in this film, one of the most successful films of the French New Wave (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000901/bio-ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm ).

After watching the French film, I realized that the main male character, his villainy aside, was quintessentially French. He was a young man in love. He loved life, himself, Patricia, the "New Yorkese," France and the French language. His complexity came from a strong contrast between his two sides: superficiality and profoundness.

Michel is best presented, opposite an American girl in Paris: Patricia. The recurring question: "what does that mean?" is central to the main theme: the meaning of life. From this one, there is another theme that appears to be born: the meaning of one's ife vs. The meaning of another's. Michel kills the policeman without giving it another thought,...

The American version had no other choice but to present a quintessentially American male character in a quintessentially American landscape, opposite a foreigner, this time, a French girl. The setting was befitting: the West coast. Los Angeles in the eighties is one of the most American cityscapes one could think of.
Jesse calls himself a "Desperado." He is in love with the freedom a road trip could promise, along with his sweetheart. He is romantic, more so than Michel and cynical, just as Michel, at the same time. As all desperadoes, he makes the audience like him, in spite of the fact that he was a murderer, having purposefully killed an innocent human being.

It is easy to guess that, Michel, Jean Paul Belmondo's character in the French film and Jesse, his American counterpart, are destined to end tragically. They are young, full of life, with no worry in the world, but they also seem detached from the rest of the world, restless and looking from something that seems to escape them.

On one hand, we see Michel driving through the French countryside dreaming of "Milano, Genova, Roma," but admiring the landscape of his native country, talking to himself about its…