“Nouvelle Vague” Review
Director: Richard Linklater Screenwriter: Holly Gent, Vincent Palmo Cast: Guillaume Marbeck, Zoey Deutch, Aubry Dullin Distributor: Netflix Running Time: 106 min. MPAA: R
Trying to divulge the role Jean-Luc Godard played in the French New Wave is a task littered with landmines of artistic ego and pretension. Thankfully, director Richard Linklater doesn’t do by-the-numbers biopics to treat Godard’s cinematic ascension for Nouvelle Vague the same way so many biographers have accounted. Linklater’s direction usually favors a lived-in quality, seeking to understand the moment rather than reciting from a textbook.
Linklater makes Godard’s rise engrossing from the first scene, dropping us right into the French New Wave in full swing. We get to meet the scrutinizing Godard (Guillaume Marbeck) alongside his director contemporaries, Agnès Varda (Roxane Rivière) and Jean Cocteau (Jean-Jacques Le Vessier), who are quickly introduced with credits to keep the scene moving. Godard has an acid tongue for film criticism, unafraid to declare shit amid a movie’s reception, but reels it in with a cigarette when watching the success of his peers. There’s a lot of excitement in France over the new films being released, and Godard feels his director’s clock is running out. It seems like everybody is making a movie, but he needs to take a shot now. After all, François Truffaut went from writing about film to directing the iconic The 400 Blows, so inspiring that Godard had to see it at Cannes for himself.
After convincing the uncertain producer Georges de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfürst) to fund a film, Godard sets to work on Breathless, and it is anything but a typical film production. Beyond being a low-budget project, an incomplete script finds the cast and crew frustrated with how Godard operates. Although landing an impressive American movie star like Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch), the director finds little use for her in the first few days of shooting. The cameraman is bewildered by Godard’s tactics of embracing too much light, the makeup artist is left on the sidelines, and even the more willing Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin) is thrown off by how little Godard wants to shoot in a day (sometimes nothing at all). It’s a vision that is so locked up in Godard’s mind that only he can see the masterpiece he’s about to unleash.
Linklater’s direction has a smooth flow between recreating the production of Breathless and the off-hours quips that coated Godard’s world and informed his style. There are the scrappy moments of genius, as when Godard utilizes a postal delivery cart to covertly film down the street, garnering natural performances as the cameraman nestles between packages. Off the clock, the crew will hang out at a cafe where Jean will teach Jean-Paul how to dance like an American, delighting Godard from afar. Nearly every moment with Beauregard finds him blustering about time and money, threatening to pull the plug as production proceeds at a sluggish pace. There’s a fly-on-the-wall sensation to viewing this project, where it’s intriguing to hear Godard’s thought process, the frustrations of Seberg when the camera is not rolling, and enlightening talks between directors about the fearlessness it takes to dive into this new cinematic landscape.
There’s a balance of tribute and dissection for Godard in this film. Linklater favors a classic shooting style: keeping the picture in grainy black-and-white, in 4:3, with reel-change burns sprinkled throughout. Yet that retro favoring never seems to crowd out the narrative that always presents an intoxicating obsession with craft and artistic drive. There’s a calm and cantankerous drive to Godard, the way her seems to guide his production with bravery into uncharted waters. Sometimes it works with beautiful shots in a bedroom, and sometimes it aggravates with how little is filmed. Despite Godard’s shifting nature, which creates tension, there are also moments of joy in the shoot, sometimes manifesting in the catharsis of actors mocking Godard’s on-screen role, and other times in a satisfaction at shooting something that makes you proud. That unpredictable nature led to making Breathless so refreshingly unorthodox in an era that demanded something new at the cinema.
Nouvelle Vague serves not just as a love letter to Jean-Luc Godard but as an ode to filmmaking inspiration in general. There’s a cyclical nature to it all, with Godard inspired by other directors (as seen in the film’s inclusion of Roberto Rossellini and Claude Chabrol) and Linklater himself inspired by Godard for his own works that challenged convention. Although not as loose as Linklater’s other films, which try to capture moments rather than production schedules, the central focus on Godard’s style and obsession makes it clear why he was one of the more essential voices of the French New Wave. It’s an artistic appreciation that speaks with greater volume than a mere essay or commentary track, making a better case of why Breathless is so brilliant. While it helps to see Godard’s film before seeing this panegyric picture, I can only hope it’ll serve as an invitation to dig up the classics.
