When I first started watching foreign films in the mid-’50s and early ’60s, I began to avidly attend films directed by Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni, and the French New Wave.
The prime French New Wave figures were François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, and Éric Rohmer—men who eschewed studio production to make personal films and saw themselves as auteurs.
In “Nouvelle Vague,” Richard Linklater (“The Before Trilogy” and “Boyhood”) has made a meticulous homage to Godard and his 1960 debut film “Breathless,” which stars Jean-Paul Belmondo (a cool, casual Aubry Dullin) and Jean Seberg (a tense Zoey Deutch with less charm than Seberg) as the doomed lovers.
The film breaks from narrative continuity, uses handheld cameras, non-linear editing, on-location shooting, and natural lighting to challenge traditional filmmaking conventions.
Linklater’s film contains images and scenes that skillfully copy Godard’s, and it provides credits in French. Still there are no unsettling jump cuts or any breaking of the fourth wall. It is also sweeter and lighter than Godard’s film.
In his career, Linklater has gone his own way (e.g., “Boyhood” and “The Before Trilogy”), creating films that are truly original and unconventional but less experimental than Godard.
The basic story for “Breathless,” written by Truffaut and Godard, is based on a sensational true-crime story about a tough guy who shoots a cop and acquires an American girlfriend on the run. He grabs at romance while he can, always aware that a cop killer’s days are numbered and bound by death.
All this is contained in Linklater’s treatment of Godard’s direction of “Breathless.” With this film, Linklater has created an homage to Godard and the New Wave as well. He views Godard as an ambitious, arrogant director who saw himself as a genius and listened to few people. But Godard was gifted and made a groundbreaking film without a script, and with the lines worked out on the day of the shooting. He also took time off during the hours he was supposed to be shooting to think.
Here, actor Guillaume Marbeck portrays a less dismissive Godard who is always filling his film with quotations and talks about “reality not being continuity” and claiming “to make films is to ask questions.” There are fights with his producer over money, and Seburg wants less chaos and a script to work from and keeps on threatening to quit. But the film is finally completed with the famous death scene where Belmondo’s last words are “disgusting.” And Seburg asks, “What’s disgusting?” The conclusion remains enigmatic, but still chilling.
If one expects a penetrating look at the main characters, one will be somewhat disappointed. This is a stylish, watchable homage that softens the hard edges of Godard but never sentimentalizes him.
