The Current Cinema - Barrie Pattison gives us another look at NOUVELLE VAGUE (Richard Linklater, USA, 2024)

Nouvelle Vague, the new Richard Linklater film, has arrived. It is an Academy frame black and white effort, in English sub-titled French, claiming to present the break out film-making of the sixties as we follow Jean-Luc Godard putting together À bout de souffle/Breathless.

Lookalikes appear as the celebrities of the French film making scene - Jean Cocteau, (“Art is not a business. It’s a priesthood”) Jean-Pierre Melville in his cowboy hat or Roberto Rossellini hitting up his driver for a loan. They are filmed in the original locations in the Paris of Linklater’s After Midnight. There's Guillaume Marbeck/Godard’s contemporaries grouped outside the Le Champo display with a Jerry Lewis poster prominent, a script conference on a bench in Richelieu-Drouot Metro, wheeling Matthieu Penchinat/Raoul Coutard’s camera concealed as a baby carriage  down the Champs Elysées following Zoey Deutch in her Jean Seberg Herald-Tribune T-Shirt or the unit playing pin ball in (is that?) the bar where they launched into spontaneous dance in Bande à part. Visitors on the nude scene shoot include Georges de Beauregard because he’s the producer and José Bénazeraf because he’s a lech.  There is a nice moment where Benjamin Clery, their Pierre Rissient, has a camera set up calculated to film the Latin Quarter street lights coming on. 

Aubry Dullin & Zoey Deutch and the Arc de Triomphe

Linklater was clearly aiming at evoking Godard’s free-wheeling style, which was so electrifying to those sixties audiences I saw sit stony faced through the earlier, master-crafted classic French films which I absorbed with such enthusiasm.

Linklater is likely to bluff viewers who didn’t live through that era but I’m continually distracted by departures from narratives with which I’m familiar. The story was that Godard made off with Cahiers du Cinéma’s petty cash to bankroll his first attempt at filmmaking. Here he uses it to get to the Cannes festival. We heard Truffaut's credited original story for A bout de souffle was a handwritten page which he scribbled to provide name prestige from his bonanza success with Les 400 Coups to fundraising.  

I haven’t handled a copy of the film but wide screen was firmly established by 1959 and the film's projections that I watched all seemed to fit comfortably on that.  We heard that Godard’s first cut was stunningly boring, so he just went through and lopped out the bits he didn’t like, joining up what was left and claiming to have invented the jump cut, which incidentally was already part of the classic film vocabulary. Look at William Wyler’s 1958 archetypically traditional The Big Country! What about the nose job Belmondo got between his earlier Godard short and their feature.Throw in an inexplicable glimpse of Françoise Arnoul’s birthday party.  

History is repeating itself here when unknown Aubry Dullin and lively visiting U.S. starlet Zoey Deutch get to animate the original movie star characters. 

Guillaume Marbeck & Richard Linklater

I’m a fan of Linklater and I can see the appeal of his version to the director of Dazed & Confused or Boyhood  but personally I’m getting over-familiar with the Godard narrative - the Richard Gere Breathless, Kristen Stewart in Seberg. By and large, I find Michel Hazanavicius’ 2017 Godard mon amour, with Lou Garrel as a  cantankerous Jean-Luc, battling middle-aged celebrity, more convincing. He always struck me as someone disturbingly undisciplined, who lucked out because he recruited talented people like Seberg and Belmondo, Raoul Coutard and Michel Legrand and I don’t know that we need two Godard bios, while Agnes Varda’s beautiful study of Jaques Demy,  Jacquot de Nantes, is all but unknown.

Maybe I’d have regarded the uneven J-LG output with more sympathy if he hadn’t been unable to come up with the names of any of the Monogram movies he’d dedicated  À bout de souffle to, when called on, a plausible test of poltroonhood.

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For another report on the film click here to read Rod Bishop's thoughts