Christmas/New Year is a bumper season for cinemas, but you have to wonder how Nouvelle Vague, Richard Linklater’s loving tribute to the French New Wave, will fair in Event Cinemas at this time of year.
Godard, Breathless and the French New Wave are probably not top-of-mind interests for most holiday punters, when they can opt for Avatar: Fire and Ash or a day at the beach, or the tennis, or the cricket...maybe not the cricket…
So far, Nouvelle Vague’s box office in cinemas has been minimal.
Made on a budget of $US10m with Netflix acquiring the streaming rights for $4m; at the time of writing this note, it has only had a cinema release in four territories: France, where it grossed $862,000; Romania, $11,600; Russia, $159,000; and The Netherlands, $53,500. Some ‘select’ cinemas in USA have screened the film to qualify it for the Oscars.
This Australian release will come before cinema releases in the UK, Germany, Italy and Spain.
In Nouvelle Vague, Roberto Rossellini refers to the Cahiers du Cinema crowd as “a circle of cinemaniacs”. It’s an apt description of Film Alert 101 readers also, but is there an audience for this film beyond such cinemania?
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| Jade Phan-Gia as Phuong Maittret; Zoey Deutch as Jean Seberg; Guillaume Marbeck as Jean-Luc Godard; Aubry Dullin as Jean-Paul Belmondo |
Instead of developing characters, Linklater has reduced everyone to a caricature, played by lookalike actors. There’s a solitary, notable exception in Zoey Deutch playing Jean Seberg, and she manages to come close to a three-dimensional performance in a film populated by two-dimensional cut-outs.
The lookalikes stream by: there’s Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol, Rivette, Rohmer, Belmondo, Demy, Varda, Resnais, Rouch, Rissient, Melville, Seberg, Coutard, Bresson, Schiffman and de Beauregard.
But the high-point of this film is Linklater’s 60-minute recreation of the Breathless shoot.
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| Aubry Dullin as Jean-Paul Belmondo; Zoey Deutch as Jean Seberg |
In pre-production, Godard (Guillaume Marbeck) tells his cameraman Raoul Coutard (Matthieu Penchinat) that he wants “guerilla” filmmaking. Handheld, no lights and no sync sound as he’ll be using the very lightweight and very noisy Cameflex Éclair, a camera Coutard at least had some experience with during World War II.
Godard also wants Ilford film stock, designed for stills photography, not movies, and he believes it can be used by splicing the small rolls together for the movie camera. Coutard agrees: if the splices go through a projector, they should go through the camera.
True to his word, the debut director’s frenzied guerilla shooting style, with no lip sync, drives most on set into bewilderment and despair.
The first day’s shoot ends after two hours, with Godard claiming “I’m out of ideas”.
Day two and the cast and crew are in the Dupont Montparnasse café having finished shooting well before lunch.
Godard deliberately disregards continuity; Seberg’s make-up artist is told to leave because “there is no make-up in this movie”; Seberg wants to quit on day three; by day five the script girl is asking Godard “Let me get this straight. Tolmachoff wants to play a gangster named Balducci. He didn’t show up so our publicist named Balducci, is going to play the gangster, but you’ve changed his name to Tolmachoff?” “Exactly” is the reply.
Coutard deadpans to Godard: “If they never let you make another film, you’ll be a world-class dolly grip”. On day six an expensive stuntman is stood down and Rivette gets to play his dead corpse instead.
Richard Linklater
By day eight, the cast and crew have an early morning call and wait in the café until Godard abruptly cancels the day’s shoot. “Maybe he’s quitting” says Seberg hopefully.
Next day, they meet up again in the café with Godard directing only one exterior shot before declaring “Let’s go eat. We’re done for the day. I’m hungry”.
By day 10 he’s called in sick and producer de Beauregard finds him in the café playing pinball. “You can’t call in sick. In two weeks, we’ve had eight half days of work, some only two hours long”. He threatens to close the production down.
They are not even halfway through the shoot, or halfway through Linklater’s recreation of the shoot. Somebody asks about the schedule. Someone else replies: “What schedule?”
For a film destined to be so influential on filmmakers and audiences alike, it’s a remarkably irreverent approach from a director marked out for greatness and blessed with an ego that would put the current English Test team to shame.
Godard’s jump-cut in Breathless revolutionized filmmaking, and he’s often mentioned as one of a handful of directors considered to have changed film language, forever. There’s only a passing reference to jump cuts in Nouvelle Vague, and it comes during a conversation between Godard and his bemused editors:
“We are not cutting any scene. We’re cutting within a scene…we’re going to cut what we can to create a new rhythm.”
“It’ll be choppy. Abrupt.”
“It’ll be amazing.”
“It’ll be disconnected like jumping everywhere.”
“Absolutely. Let’s make everything jump.”
Perhaps Godard’s approach to filmmaking is best condensed in his own words:
“Three-quarters of directors waste four hours on a shot that requires four minutes of actual directing. I prefer to have five minutes work for the crew – and keep the three hours to myself for thought.”
Others mentioned: Marc Pierret (on-set reporter); Richard Balducci (publicist); Jacques Doniol-Valcroze (critic, actor); Amarilù Parolini (screenwriter, secretary Cahiers du Cinema); Michel Mourlet (critic); Pierre Kast (screenwriter, director); Claude Mauriac (essayist); Jacques Rozier (screenwriter, director); André Labarthe (actor, producer); Françoise Arnoul (actress); Juliet Greco (singer, actress); Jean Cocteau; Liliane David (actress); Georges Sadoul (critic); Pierre Braunberger (producer); José Bénazéraf (erotic filmmaker); Phuong Maittret (make-up); Daniel Boulanger (novelist); Michel Fabre (writer)
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