Who wouldn’t want to be in Paris in 1959? The city is abuzz with creative energy. A revolution in art, literature and especially cinema is taking hold. The New Wave is in its infancy, powered by a coterie of critics from the film journal Cahier Du Cinéma who have started to make their own movies, eschewing the staid traditions of the well-made French film. Already, Claude Chabrol has directed two features and Francois Truffaut’s “400 Blows” took audiences by storm at Cannes. But the main event was yet to come—Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless.”
Like most cineastes of a certain age, director Richard Linklater (“Boyhood,” “Before Midnight”) has long been obsessed by the French New Wave. He has wanted to make a film about Godard making “Breathless” for over 10 years.” “Nouvelle Vague” is his portal to that time and place.
But “Nouvelle Vague” is not just a simple homage to a bygone era seen through rose-colored glasses. It is a gleaming black and white film and like “Breathless,” it attempts to catch the passion of the period and the thrill of discovering a new cinematic language. You could say it exists in the present tense in a parallel universe with “Breathless.” Before shooting, Linklater told his actors “You are NOT making a period film. You are living in the moment.”
On the page, “Breathless” was nothing special. It started as an outline for a movie that Truffaut and Godard had been playing around with based on a newspaper story about a petty criminal who stole a car, killed a cop, and hid out with his American girlfriend in Paris. It was the kind of pulp material that the New Wave directors admired from American filmmakers like Howard Hawks, Nicholas Ray and Samuel Fuller, among others. As Godard famously said, all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun.
There never was a shooting script for “Breathless.” Godard made it up as he went along, searching for moments that rang true. He would sometimes sit around in a café waiting for divine inspiration, and when inspiration failed to come he would send everyone home for the day.
Since Godard’s little known actors, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, went on to become international stars and icons of the New Wave after “Breathless,” casting presented a tricky challenge for Linklater. He insisted on using unknown actors that would not take the audience out of the story but at the same time could still duplicate the charisma of the originals. The casting of “Nouvelle Vague” is nothing short of miraculous. Aubry Dullin and Zoey Deutch bear an uncanny resemblance to Belmondo and Seberg as they strike familiar poses—Belmondo with a cigarette constantly dangling from his lower lip, Seberg with her good-girl, bad-girl gamine face framed in close-ups by her close-cropped hair. It’s them, but it’s not them, and that’s the charm of the film. And Guillaume Marbeck nails Godard’s single-mindedness and self-assurance but also his sly sense of fun.
The Godard we see here, and by all accounts what he was like in real life, is an enigmatic man of supreme confidence bordering on arrogance. No one can tell exactly what’s going on behind the dark glasses he never removes or the meaning of aphorisms he has collected in his little black book and is constantly spouting—pronouncements like “A filmmaker is either a plagiarist or a revolutionary” and “Art is never finished, only abandoned.’’ Huh? He may be the real genius of the New Wave, at least that what he tells people, but no one knows for sure yet. The one thing he is certain of is that the rules of cinema are meant to be broken, and that’s what he goes about doing—gleefully.
Since he is improvising as he goes and hasn’t proven himself yet, no one really knows if he’s full of shit or not. But the crew—from his often-exasperated producer Georges de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfürst) to his legendary assistant director, Pierre Rissient (Benjamin Clery), shares his mission to remake cinema, and gladly signs on. The characters in the film are not yet who they will become but Linklater cleverly shares their excitement for the future of cinema.
Part of the pleasure of watching “Nouvelle Vague” is seeing dozens of New Wavers, identified with name tags on screen, before anyone knew who they were. There’s Godard’s great New Wave cinematographer Raoul Coutard (Matthieu Penchinat), fresh out of the army and ready to try anything; the queen bee of the New Wave, Suzanne Schiffman (Jodie Ruth Forest), script supervisor and co-writer of some of Truffaut’s greatest films; and the filmmakers themselves: Truffaut (Adrien Rouyard); Jacques Rivette (Jonas Marmy); Erich Rohmer (Côme Thieulin), and the Cahier du Cinéma gang. Seeing their names and faces flash up on the screen is like seeing people you recognize in a crowd.
More than anything, Linklater hoped to create a “hanging out movie” that follows a group of young people having the time of their lives working together. But the task of making “Nouvelle Vague” feel like it was actually taking place in Paris in 1959 was no mean feat. Linklater wanted to film with roughly the same means available to Godard. He kept Godard’s antique Cameflex camera on the set to remind people that direct sound was impossible on “Breathless” with such a noisy camera. Costumes capture the rumpled bohemian look of the late ’50s with plaid jackets, skinny ties and lots of fedoras. A soundtrack of hit tunes and vintage cool jazz—French and American—by Zoot Sims, Count Basie and others, makes the period details pop.
Fortunately, Godard was the real deal and “Breathless” went on to became one of the landmarks of international cinema, as influential in its own way as D.W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation” and Orson Welle’s “Citizen Kane.” Not everyone, however, was ready for Godard’s new style of jump cuts, out-of-studio locations, and working class kids navigating a changing world. The old school critic of The New York Times, Bosley Crowther, declared “Breathless” “completely devoid of moral tone,” and saw in Belmondo only “a hypnotically ugly new young man.”
For Linklater, who fell under the spell of the New Wave and would see its faith in cinema as an open invitation to one day try it himself, “Nouvelle Vague” is both a love letter and a thank you note. It’s unlike anything you have seen before—unless you happened to be hanging out in Paris in 1959.
