Film review: Nouvelle Vague

How’s this for the beginning of a film about film critics turned revolutionary filmmakers? A group of young dissidents watch the end of Pierre Schoendoerffer’s Pêcheur d’Islande when the lights go up, a wave applause fills the room while the baffling critics look at each other and declare the death of cinema. I should be happily offended.

This is an important moment in film history. The critics are François Truffaut (Adrien Rouyard), Claude Chabrol (Antoine Besson), Suzanne Schiffman (Jodie Ruth-Forest), and standing out with his iconic sunglasses even in the dark of a cinema, Jean-Luc Godard (Guillaume Marbeck). All of them are writers for the publication Le Cahiers Du Cinema, and all are in the process of changing the course of cinema forever.

This is not a hyperbole. The role of these people (and Jacques Rivette, Agnés Varda, Éric Rohmer and Jacques Demy, who also appear in the film) cannot be overstated. Together they helmed the French New Wave, an artistic moment that celebrated cinema through the lens of its auteur, and galvanised films that explored past the limits of the medium. Without them there would be no American New Hollywood, no Tarantino, no Scorsese, no modern cinema the way we know it. They celebrated filmmakers deemed too popular by the critical establishment for their transgressive nature (Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Nicholas Ray) and panned the mundane lavish big productions to the extent that those films, like the ones the group is watching in the first scene, have mostly been forgotten while the filmmakers championed by the Cahiers were elevated to masters of the medium.

Honestly, we’d all strive to be like them. Linklater’s new film, shot in in black and white and with an aesthetic reminiscent of the films of Godard and Truffaut, is like an observant love letter to a defining moment in film history. Dejected that he’s the only critic who hasn’t produced a film, Godard moves to finally sign his first production with the support of the producer Georges de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfürst). Godard is a unique character. An avid consumer of film and literature, every single line is delivered with the weight of a profound quote. He looks up to the people he finds inspiring (Jean-Pierre Melville and Roberto Rossellini turn up at some point) but he’s dedicated in finding his own cinematic language, throwing away the expectation of productions, from script to planning.

The film he’s making needs no introduction. Breathless with a young Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin) and Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch). There’s barely any script, the dialogue is fed to the actors as the scenes are rolling, and a lot of it will be dubbed in post-production. Seberg, who is at a defining moment of her career after working with Otto Preminger in Bonjour Tristesse, finds the process difficult and demeaning, while Beauregard threatens to cancel the production at any point.

I like Linklater’s idea of shooting in the stye of the movement, including these amusing static introductory shots of the protagonists, but it highlights how little else the film has to say. I am the right audience; I love all those people and gasped every time a new doppelganger appeared. Is this what a Marvel fan feels when their favourite characters appear unannounced in a film? Linklater’s respect and passion for the subject is palpable; he doesn’t overanalyse the moment and constantly reminds us that this is like watching in the making. The actors follow a curious line of pantomime that sometimes works well (Marbeck and Rouyard) while others are only cast for the likeness and fail to reach the aura of the actor (that Belmondo has very little Belmondo in him, which is unfair because those are some big shoes to fill, but the contrast is shocking). Deutch was probably my favourite, as a Seberg that is not the ethereal mermaid her image transformed into after her death, but a grounded artist whose chaotic charm eventually matches Godard’s.

For the rest of his career Godard turned into an untouchable. A relentless artist who constantly pushed the boundary of the medium to find new ways to transmit his ideas. He became a recluse who Varda famously tried to meet in the heartbreaking final scene of her last picture Faces Places. It’s not ironic that Godard would’ve probably hated this film. I bet even Linklater expected this, but his lessons seemed to have been lost in mute ears. If anything is taken at the end it is that this important moment of artistic rebellion gave us only imitators. The style and the quotes morphing into trite pop culture snapshots (“All you need to make a film is a woman and a gun”), the ethos of those chain smokers inside Parisian cinemas was lost by us all. That the most, arguably, most influential film of all time is now a long anecdote to be imitated by pantomime actors shouldn’t at all diminish the enjoyment of Nouvelle Vague, but it tries to reduce the importance of the movement.

Verdict: 3.5 out of 5
For terminal cinephiles who know, love and hate the work of Godard, Truffaut et al. I doubt anyone who knows who these people are will find much to enjoy, but those who do have something to hold onto.