Richard Linklater’s “Nouvelle Vague” is a movie about the making of a movie. If that sounds too esoteric, there’s more: It’s in French, in black and white, with English subtitles. The film being chronicled is Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless,” the 1960 French New Wave classic starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg that changed the face of cinema.
I greatly enjoyed “Nouvelle Vague,” but will anybody besides cinemaniacs and “Breathless” devotees appreciate it? I think the answer is yes. That’s because it’s not simply a movie about how a landmark maverick movie got made. Its true subject is the exhilaration that comes from being part of an artistic escapade. It’s about how art – the making of it and the appreciation of it – can free you.
Linklater and his screenwriters did not set out to make a biopic about a pic. There is nothing academic in their approach. But neither does the film attempt to reproduce a New Wave movie. Linklater is smart enough, and respectful enough, to know that his film is an homage, not a copy. He is paying tribute to Godard by not even trying to match him – an impossible task anyway.
Why We Wrote This
Richard Linklater’s “Nouvelle Vague” is about the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless.” But its true subject is the exhilaration that comes from being part of an artistic escapade, writes our film critic.
He did, however, cast his film with actors who, right down to the cinematographer and assistant director, look uncannily like the original people – most startlingly Guillaume Marbeck as Godard, never without his shades; Aubry Dullin as the gangly Belmondo; and Zoey Deutch as Seberg, with her bohemian chic and pixie cut.
Linklater dives right into the heady, movie-mad atmosphere of those days, when young would-be filmmakers amassed in smoky bistros and cafés and argued incessantly about movies. As he also demonstrated in his other terrific movie this year, “Blue Moon,” Linklater is unapologetically unafraid to show us smart people talking their heads off.
Along with François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, and many others, Godard was a spiky film critic for the seminal French film journal Cahiers du Cinéma. Their writings often touted Hollywood melodramas and crime thrillers over more “prestigious” fare. Though “Nouvelle Vague” soft-pedals it, they also brutally downgraded the work of celebrated old-guard French directors such as Marcel Carné (“Children of Paradise”). Many of these Cahiers writers became film directors – Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows” led the charge – and, not quite 30, Godard thirsted to join their ranks. His mantra, repeated in “Nouvelle Vague,” was, “The best way to criticize a film is to direct it.”
Even by New Wave standards, the filming of “Breathless” – a micro-budget movie about a petty thief and his American girlfriend – was haphazard. Its fractured narrative style, revolutionary as it was, was also the inevitable result of Godard’s improvisatory instincts. Linklater – whose own career began in 1990 with the hang-loose “Slacker” – shows us how maddening it could be for the actors and put-upon producer (Bruno Dreyfürst) to abide Godard’s rule-breaking.
It also demonstrates how Godard’s approach was, at the same time, liberating. “Following rules won’t get me where I want to go,” he says. Linklater doesn’t make the mistake of tipping us off how revolutionary “Breathless” will be. None of its participants, not even the ego-inflated Godard, had any inkling what they were a part of. We never lose sight of the fact that this movie, with its rapid-fire shooting schedule and primitive sound-recording equipment, was fraught from the get-go.
But we also never lose sight of the passion invested in the making of “Breathless” amid all the hijinks and subterfuges. Godard might have come across as a species of poseur – a pretentious, quote-spouting mountebank – but his way of seeing was genuinely new. Jean Cocteau is quoted in “Nouvelle Vague” as saying, “Art is not a pastime but a priesthood.” Linklater’s movie is a most enjoyable and affectionate act of genuflection.
A footnote: I once interviewed Godard when he visited Los Angeles in the 1980s. Wearing wraparound sunglasses indoors, issuing occasional gnomic responses to my nervous inquiries, he was exactly as I expected he would be. A sublime memory for me.
Peter Rainer is the Monitor’s film critic. This movie is rated R for some language.
