TORN FROM A REVIEWER’S NOTE PAD: Walking out of Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague, we couldn’t get a certain crazy retro-pop ditty out of our heads. In Dave Frishberg and Bob Dorough’s 1966 song “I’m Hip,” unforgettably covered by cocktail-lounge chantoozie Blossom Dearie, the singer mock-complains about the latest, coolest thing from Paris: “Every Saturday night/With my suit buttoned tight and my suedes on/I’m gettin’ my kicks/Watchin’ arty French flicks with my shades on.”
They were talking about Jean-Luc Godard, of course.
Nouvelle Vague is filmmaker Richard Linklater’s dramatized, somewhat fictionalized tribute to director Godard’s outrageously influential film, À bout de souffle. That 1960 release, translated as Breathless in English-language markets, inspired a worldwide vogue for French movies with a similar brash and stylish attitude. They became collectively labeled the French New Wave.
The much younger Linklater—who went on to fashion such hard-to-categorize films as Slacker, Boyhood and the Before Sunrise trilogy—was left breathless himself when he first looked at Godard’s daring debut, years after the fact in the 1980s, when Linklater was just starting out. For better or worse, Linklater throws everything he knows about the late Godard into the new tribute.
Linklater must have been just about the last hipster to flip out over Franco-Swiss import Godard: his unshaven rodent-like face, his sexy starlet girlfriends (clock Danish model Anna Karina), his wholehearted love of classic big-studio Hollywood, the avant-garde design of his titles, etc. But most of all the zany exuberance of his movies, suddenly popping in and out of art houses like a cigarette machine loaded with Gauloises—in those zany, exuberant days before students everywhere began worrying about Vietnam.
Nouvelle Vague has noble intentions. It’s a valentine to the spirit of the French New Wave from someone who knows what he’s talking about—equipped with sparkling production values, interesting characterizations and the all-important sense of humor.
But there are questions. At this stage of the game, producing an appreciation of a cultural phenomenon and era that most 21st-century movie audiences have never heard of is braver than brave—it’s the definition of what-the-hell narrowcasting. To release it in subtitled French is even crazier. The cast of unknown French actors, starring Guillaume Marbeck as Godard, is the cherry on top, fully and openly declaring that Linklater’s love letter is a rare specialty item aimed at cinephiles and film industry veterans only. Who else is going to sit still for make-believe “cameos” of such contemporaries as Georges de Beauregard, François Moreuil or Phuong Maittret?
Not for Linklater is the A Complete Unknown approach, with its pop-culture idol worship made accessible by using Hollywood stars and dreamy romantic interludes. That’s the easy way to do it. Linklater does it the hard way. He’s in love. So we’ve got the black-and-white story of a relatively obscure figure and his times, in the French language, with no stars. It looks and feels like the consummate reward project. (Try to picture Timothée Chalamet as Godard, with Margot Robbie as Jean Seberg.)
Notwithstanding the above, adventurous film nerds surrendering to Linklater’s vision of le beau monde are in for a treat. The Cahiers du Cinéma claque of critics who transformed themselves into filmmakers is all dug up, alongside every auteur from Jean-Pierre Melville (cowboy-hatted, at his “factory”) to Robert Bresson (portrayed by Aurélien Lorgnier as an ancient sage).
One of Linklater’s stated aims in Nouvelle Vague is to demonstrate how a film gets made, down to the smallest detail. In the case of Godard’s À bout de souffle, Linklater shows how difficult it was to make such a complicated scheme look fun. A grumbling producer might boil the original pic’s concept down to “a realistic, sexy slice of film noir,” but we know better than that. Jean-Luc Godard was some sort of revolutionary prophet, and Breathless/À bout de souffle was the opening title in his 138-film gospel.
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In theaters Oct. 31; on Netflix starting Nov. 14.
