Last year the world lost Jean-Paul Belmondo. His passing largely went unnoticed as people were preoccupied with global health crises. This year, amid another wave of stress, the world barely registered another monumental loss: Jean-Luc Godard, Belmondo’s cinematic father.
Over the past half-century, people around the globe have seen society shaped by adventurous, often reckless men. Those men drove progress, fearlessly pushing into the future. And if marriages in that era crumbled in many places—because real men didn’t match a mythical ideal—Monsieur Belmondo was part of that story.
Jean-Paul Belmondo, Rome, 1962
He became the face of an era, translating his on-screen masculinity into real life. He didn’t break, even when death came knocking in 2001. After fighting back, Belmondo relearned how to walk and talk. The recovery surprised everyone: in 2003, this man of reinvention became a father for the fourth time.
Jean-Paul Belmondo at the Cannes Film Festival, 2011. Georges Biard
In 2008 he astonished film lovers again by starring in The Man and His Dog, directed by François Uzan. The indomitable actor rekindled his relationship with cinema. His role in this remake of Vittorio De Sica’s Umberto D (1952) showed a very different Belmondo. Yet a hint of the old flame remained: even in his later work he felt like a genuine superhero. Perhaps a slightly unconventional one—wearier of passions and turned inward.
In this, his first explicitly age-related role at 75, he embodied a retiree abandoned by everyone except his loyal dog. Belmondo didn’t resist that sad but, sadly, realistic metamorphosis. The lesson from 2001 taught this once-wild stuntman to appreciate life at any age, no matter how cliché that may sound.
On the “New Wave”
Belmondo amassed a filmography of more than a hundred films. His screen career ran alongside the New Wave movement. He became its face in the late 1950s, thanks to his cinematic father—Jean-Luc Godard. At that moment, you could almost say that Belmondo and the New Wave were one and the same.
The actor and the new cinematic era burst into public view with equal boldness. European cinema shed its complexes. Directors experimented boldly. Characters set out on paths of rebellion—read: permissiveness.
Belmondo and Pascal Petit on the set of “Letters from a Nun” (1960)
As for plots, directors seemed intent on burning down what had come before and staging a revolution in screenwriting. The conformism that had replaced the excesses of postwar society no longer attracted audiences. Its wave receded into a firm “no.” In its place rose the New Wave.
Godard’s Breathless (1960), the film that made Jean-Paul Belmondo famous, captured the early experiments of that newborn movement.
The 26-year-old actor initially didn’t believe the film would succeed. As a recent theater performer and budding film actor, he probably didn’t yet grasp his potential. By then Belmondo had some screen experience, notably in Claude Chabrol’s The Double Lock (1959), which he regarded as a reasonably successful effort.
Jean-Paul Belmondo during the filming of “The Man from Rio” (1964).
At first, Jean-Paul was intimidated by Godard’s deep dive into form. It seemed the director didn’t know what he was after. Yet the free cinema about free people in Breathless resonated. Audiences reacted as if the film were existence itself—both real and surreal. The live camera in the hands of New Wave filmmakers brought people closer, on-screen and off.
But back in 1960 the era of cultivated antiheroes had not fully arrived. Michel, Belmondo’s character—a hustler, steward, thief, murderer, gigolo— stirred the public imagination with a light romanticization of crime. Jean‑Paul portrayed a different kind of downfall than Camus’: one without deep anguish or introspection. The misdeeds, in the young actor’s hands, read almost as actions rather than moral crises. The hero was at once repulsive and likable. Emerging postmodernism gave equal space to the high and the low, the simple and the arrogant.
Contemporary and Classic
It didn’t take long for an army of Belmondo fans to name a movement after him: Belmondism.
Jean-Paul Belmondo’s handprint on the sidewalk in front of the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès in Cannes. Marco Bernardini
In the 1970s he moved away from elite cinema. Jean‑Paul appeared in commercial projects, often comedies with an adventurous edge. Against a backdrop of political and economic instability, crowd-pleasing, entertainment-driven cinema took hold. A large part of that shift owed itself to Belmondo’s presence in those films.
Selected filmography: “Breathless” (1960), “The Sorceress” (1961), “The Man from Rio” (1964), “The Thief” (1967), “The Siren from Mississippi” (1969), “Borsalino” (1970), “Second Marriage” (1971), “The Monster” (1977), “The Game of Four Hands” (1980), “The Professional” (1981), “Ace of Aces” (1982), “Les Misérables” (1995), “Desire” (1996), “One Chance for Two” (1998), “The Man and His Dog” (2008).
