Film Review: Some Things Old, Some Things New in 'Nouvelle Vague'

Richard Linklater's love letter to the making of a seminal Godard movie is defiantly retro

Richard Linklater is so loving toward Jean-Luc Godard’s debut feature Breathless that he’s made Nouvelle Vague in a way that almost seems to shadow the 1960 classic: In black and white, with stylistic mischief, and in French. Mais oui, you heard right: In French.

(Photo: Guillaume Marbeck, Zoey Deutch, and Aubry Dullin in Nouvelle Vague. Netflix)

Godard (Guillaume Marbeck) is inching toward his late 20s without having directed his first feature film — a milestone his compatriots at film magazine Cahiers du cinéma have all achieved ahead of him. French movies are in the midst of a new wave — literally called the New Wave, in fact — and Godard is itching to be a part of it. When producer Georges de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfürst), lovingly referred to as Beau-Beau both by Godard and by the film’s subtitles, offers Godard the assignment of directing a movie penned by François Truffaut (who has just scored a major triumph with The 400 Blows), Godard signs on… though with the understanding (which Beau-Beau might not really understand in advance) that he’s going to be all-in when it comes to French New Wave’s disregard of established cinematic convention. His most valuable piece of pre-shoot advice is delivered by none other than Roberto Rossellini (Laurent Mothe, delivering a rumpled, sandwich-stealing chef’s kiss of a performance). Rossellini tells Godard to “find cheap solutions” and to be insolent. It’s counsel Godard takes to with relish.

(Photo: Guillaume Marbeck and Aubry Dullin in Nouvelle Vague. Netflix)

But whether this is a recipe for genius or mere mask to hide behind while he works it all out, Godard drives everyone nuts. For one thing, he barely seems to do anything; a typical shooting day might last only a couple of hours, and there are only 20 shooting days in the schedule. What’s more, the script Godard is rewriting from Truffaut’s work exists not in paper but in his mind, and it’s being rewritten continuously — and on the fly, much to the chagrin of American star Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch). “No, that’s all for today,” Godard suddenly declares on one occasion, after a mere two hours of camera work; “I’m out of ideas.” It’s an announcement Godard unleashes amidst a torrent of pithy quotes and colorful, if sometimes faux-intellectual sounding, aphorisms. It’s not long before Seberg lets fly with her own memorable mot juste, telling Godard, “I might just walk out on you and your film.” Unflappable, Godard replies: “See? You’re starting to get it.”

(Photo: Zoey Deutch and Guillaume Marbeck in Nouvelle Vague. Netflix)

French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin), by contrast, cheerfully embraces the spirit of the film and the mad methods of its director, and there are a few small moments that sketch a growing attraction between the two leads. (Seberg’s husband, François Moreuil, played by Paolo Luka-Noé, manages Seberg’s growing discontent with a mixture of philosophizing and practicality.) The chemistry between Seberg and Belmondo is palpable, and fortuitous: “Good thing the camera loves those two,” one crew member mutters to another after another of Godard’s impossibly short shooting days.

(Photo: Aubry Dullin and Zoey Deutch in Nouvelle Vague. Netflix)

The camera does love them, just as it adores Deutch and Dullin. Godard himself remains something of a cipher, which seems to be his intention (no one wears sunglasses while watching a movie in a theater unless they mean to cultivate a certain air of detachment and impassivity). Whether fruitlessly exhorting Seberg on a critical scene or hammering away at a pinball machine, Godard is a vision of artistic ambition and seemingly unfocused intensity, as insubstantial as cigarette smoke and yet exerting a mammoth gravity on everything around him. He seems clueless — even hopeless — at the start, and yet everything gels. Even his gonzo approach to film making starts to gain creative momentum: Continuity? Eye lines? Forget all of that, and bring your most raw, weary, sexy, and pathetic self to the shoot. Things will work out from there.

Linklater’s own stylistic eccentricities mark this film out as more than mere homage; he stocks the picture with characters that have any slight connection to Godard, Breathless, or the French New Wave, and poses them as if for formal portraits upon their introductions. (They might not be seen again after that, and you may never have heard of many of them, but that in itself is a rather ingenious sort of democratization.) His dedication to the look, sound, and feel of movies from that period creates a different sort of viewing experience: From the slightly muzzled, muddy sound to the flicker of cue markers (those dots that flashed just before and after a movie’s reels switched over) Nouvelle Vague replicates the kind of warm analogue envelope that audophiles attribute to vinyl LPs. Steve Lindeman’s period-appropriate score and a sprinkling of vintage tunes (using The Olympics’ “Hully Gully?” That’s genius of a rare order) round things out. This is not a mere movie, it’s a lovingly crafted experience in cinema from another age.

Will Nouvelle Vague leave you breathless? At moments — sometimes with laughter, sometimes with admiration, and sometimes because you don’t know what the hell to think. Well done, Msr. Linklater!

Nouvelle Vague streams on Netflix starting November 14.