(3.5 stars)Sometimes a passion project leans a little too hard into the first half of that descriptor. (Who said “Glitter”? Did you just say “Glitter”?)
But Richard Linklater’s “Nouvelle Vague” — an uncanny homage to French New Wave master Jean-Luc Godard and, specifically, the making of his 1960 breakthrough, “Breathless” — balances its fervor with a stunning cinematic undertaking. Put simply, lovers of “Breathless” will be left so.
Sometimes a passion project leans a little too hard into the first half of that descriptor. (Who said “Glitter”? Did you just say “Glitter”?)
But Richard Linklater’s “Nouvelle Vague” — an uncanny homage to French New Wave master Jean-Luc Godard and, specifically, the making of his 1960 breakthrough, “Breathless” — balances its fervor with a stunning cinematic undertaking. Put simply, lovers of “Breathless” will be left so.
Though rather un-Godard-like in its chronological recounting of the tumultuous 20 days Godard and his tagalong crew had to shoot his debut, Linklater emulates his hero with exacting precision in nearly every other respect: the moody, grainy black-and-white image; the darting, impromptu perspective; the palpable faith in pure impulse as a source of high art.
In an interview, Linklater remarked that “the whole film is kind of a magic trick,” and indeed, one feels buoyed throughout “Nouvelle Vague” by a delightful suspension of disbelief: The combination of almost entirely digital camerawork by director of photography David Chambille, attentive production design (Katia Wyszkop) and visual effects helps “Nouvelle Vague” feel like a trove of found footage.
Even the screenplay, by Holly Gent and Vince Palmo Jr., adopts Godard’s penchant for cramming in as many zingy declarations as possible: “The camera is a ballpoint pen! An imbecile!”; “Reality is not continuity!”; “Disappointments are temporary. Film is forever.” Linklater fans will appreciate dialogue that bristles with casual ruminations on life and art, which don’t feel at all out of place in mid-century Paris.
Guillaume Marbeck’s restless Godard holds attention like a hornet trapped in the frame, the camera always trying to keep up or keep out of his way. His performance is essential to one of the film’s revelations — if Godard challenged his audiences, it was nothing compared to what his cast and crew endured.
To this end, Zoey Deutch’s pitch-perfect Jean Seberg makes an enthralling stand-in for the American viewer, thrown into the madness of Godard’s method — i.e., jotting a few lines of a script at a cafe each morning (or not) and calling off the shoot once he was out of ideas for the day. Deutch’s disarming toggle between vexation and surrender (depending on le jour) changed the way I see Seberg as Patricia.
Aubry Dullin’s Jean-Paul Belmondo — the boxer turned actor who made his own breakthrough in “Breathless” — is unexpectedly charming, especially his scene sparring with Godard while discussing the part of the fugitive Michel. The reckless romantic entanglement of this primary duo — Michel a thief and murderer on the run, Patricia the American he sweeps up from selling copies of the New York Herald Tribune — draws its realism from two actors caught in the same current.
The real fun for movie buffs is the world that swirls like cigarette smoke (so much smoking!) around this film-within-a-film — one that felt charmed from the get-go, with the freshly triumphant François Truffaut (Adrien Rouyard) behind the script — or, at least, the general shape of one. And the team of Godard and cinematographer Raoul Coutard (Matthieu Penchinat) is immediately likable.
It’s also a film crammed with nerdy details: You’ll hear all about Rolleiflex cameras and spliced reels of Ilford stock, and thrill as the team successfully times a shot with the turning of the streetlamps.
Linklater’s love for “Breathless” runs deep into its credits, and we end up hanging with the whole crew. This includes Godard’s confused but ever-amenable script supervisor Suzon Faye (a marvelous Pauline Belle); makeup artist Phuong Maittret (Jade Phan-Gia); and, of course, his besieged and nearly bankrupted producer Beau-Beau, or Georges de Beauregard, embodied with believably elevated blood pressure by Bruno Dreyfürst.
The film also people-watches an ongoing procession of directors and artists who made the late-1950s Parisian scene what it was, from Suzanne Schiffman (Jodie Ruth-Forest) and Agnès Varda (Roxane Rivière) to Claude Chabrol (Antoine Besson) and Jean Cocteau (Jean-Jacques Le Vessier). An encounter with Robert Bresson (Aurélien Lorgnier) shooting in the subway somehow feels charged with genuine happenstance.
The effect of “Nouvelle Vague” and its various verisimilitudes is disarming to the point of disorientation. At times, the doubles begin to blur and you forget what you are watching. Godard remarks that he is directing “a documentary about Belmondo and Seberg acting out a fiction,” and in a way, he’s speaking for Linklater.
Similarly, more than once, the guerrilla tactics, populous scenes and plans-are-for-squares ethos of Godard feel loudly reminiscent of Linklater’s own influentially transient and devoutly DIY breakthrough with 1990’s “Slacker.” Somewhere behind the smoke and mirrors of “Nouvelle Vague” is a tender autobiography of a young filmmaker finding his light.
And though we really don’t need an extra layer of meta here, if there’s one unfortunate aspect of most viewers catching this film on Netflix after its limited theatrical run, it’s that the big-screen experience meticulously designed by Linklater and Co. may not translate as fully to the living room.
“Nouvelle Vague” is more than a love letter from Linklater to Godard. It’s experiencing one’s dream of the other, and it’s never clear who is playing the dreamer.
R. Available on Netflix. Contains mature language. 106 minutes.
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