Director: Richard Linklater
Stars: Zoey Deutch, Adrien Rouyard, Guillaume Marbeck
Appearing swiftly in the wake of his Lorenz Hart miniature (no pun intended) Blue Moon, Nouvelle Vague finds seasoned Austin filmmaker Richard Linklater continuing a push into the apocrypha surrounding mid 20th century arts. This latest will probably carry more weight for cineastes, as Linklater delves into the creative brouhaha of Jean-Luc Godard’s hugely influential À bout de souffle, known more commonly in English-speaking locales as Breathless.
It’s the late ’50s. Inspired by the efforts of Roberto Rossellini in Italy, the cadre of writers at Paris’ Cahiers du Cinéma have become cinematic upstarts themselves, with the likes of François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette and Claude Chabrol already courting adoration on the festival circuit. Sitting among them is precocious poser and indignant critic Jean-Luc Godard (Guillaume Marbeck), lagging behind his peers, eager to get into the directing game and help shape the so-called ‘nouvelle vague’ – fleet-of-foot rule-breaking adventures in cinema that could be cloying, pretentious… and often irrepressibly exciting.
These are qualities that Linklater seems to appreciate – even revere – but he finds them tricky to replicate in his largely inoffensive, slightly pointless biopic. Though he borrows tics from Godard (characters directing their attention to camera, busting the fourth wall; clipped handheld; the boxy monochrome aesthetic at large), he mainly cliff-notes the known anecdotes of the time, ferrying us a film-about-a-film to fling on the stack that already clutter middle-class streamers and half-empty library shelves. It’s the kind of bourgeoisie filmmaking Godard would probably have detested, actually (though his ego wouldn’t have minded the hagiography one bit).
With Truffaut and Chabrol’s names attached creatively, Godard is able to ferry his debut feature into being; a scrappy micro-budget effort starring actor Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin) about a cop-killing petty thief scampering about Paris enamoured with a newspaper salesgirl. Godard contends – famously – that all you need for a movie is a gun and a girl. He has a prop gun, but he doesn’t have the girl. He sets his sights on American movie star Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch) whom, of course, he gets.
The 20-day shoot (less run’n’gun, more ‘break for lunch’), the philosophy of invigorating independent filmmaking, the spirit of improvisation; these are all things that Linklater himself has experienced and even embodied in his own way. But appreciation isn’t enough to make Nouvelle Vague feel in any way necessary. Of course, no film is necessary. That’s their beauty. But all of Vague‘s architecture is borrowed. It becomes a fawning monument to another artist’s work that has no feeling or signature of its own. In Deutch and Dullin he has very adept facsimiles for Seberg and Belmondo. But that’s all that’s happening here. Appreciative reproduction. It’s stale and – running a quarter of an hour longer than À bout de souffle itself – lacking in Godard’s own desire for something fast, smart and astonishing. One thing it isn’t, is breathless.
The relentless subtitles telling us who everyone is soon come to feel meaningless, like sifting through a bibliography for the substance of a research text. It’s context for aficionados that’ll do nothing for the uninitiated. They’re endemic of the whole, unfortunately. Linklater preaches to the choir without giving the faithless anything to latch onto. Godard is presented largely as he was; aloof, arrogant, hidden behind his sunglasses. Seberg comes off as rather bratty, but understandably so, given her director’s frustratingly casual approach. Linklater gives everything a pass, because he knows that history will bare Godard out. He refuses any opportunity for contentiousness. Nothing is remarkable. Those aforementioned uninitiated types will be far better off seeking out the works so thoroughly lionised in the script’s incessant namechecking.
Nouvelle Vague sits beside Me and Orson Welles down at (or close to) the very bottom of Linklater’s sprawling, inconsistent repertoire.
The Lost Highway Hotel 