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With his focus on comedy and mass entertainment, Yamada has diverged from the path of the highly acclaimed “Nouvelle Vague,” or Japanese New Wave, which includes directors such as Nagisa Oshima of “In the Realm of the Senses” and Masahiro Shinoda, who directed “Ballad of Orin” — works that focused on the darker themes of sexuality and social brutality.

Starring Jean-Paul Belmondo as a brash French hooligan and Jean Seberg as the American in Paris he loves against his better judgment, “Breathless” caused a sensation when it took its place as one of the first examples of what came to be known as la Nouvelle Vague, a.k.a. the French New Wave.

The film was based on an idea by François Truffaut, another icon of the nouvelle vague, and began shooting in Paris without a script.

Simultaneously, he’d been writing, shooting and producing his own projects — most of them not in the action genre, but dramas, comedies and even a silent film inspired by Jean-Luc Godard’s nouvelle vague classic “Band of Outsiders” — aiming to build a reel and take his career into his own hands.

It’s extremely poetic and introspective, almost like a Japanese nouvelle vague from the ’80s.