NOUVELLE VAGUE
How are your New Year’s resolutions holding up? For my part, I have (so far…) entirely failed to initiate my highfalutin commitment to writing a great work of fiction and finishing a long-gestating screenplay; I’ve done alright with the boring-as-hell-but-good-for-you commitment to exercising daily (although my idea of exercise is on-line yoga I can do while holding a hot cup of tea… or glass of wine, on occasion… so don’t expect any mind-blowing body transformations…); my vanity-driven commitment to fitting into my jeans is already done and dusted, thank you very much (life hack: order jeans two sizes larger than whatever is your “normal” on New Year’s Eve and you can cross that one off your list almost immediately); and, finally, my resolution to be a little bit nicer to everyone and more generous with my film reviews is just beginning (and looks promising!).
If Richard Linklater made a resolution a couple of years back, I can only assume it was to spend more time with his creative heroes. First we had BLUE MOON and now we have NOUVELLE VAGUE, a love letter to cinematic heroes if ever there was one. The two films have landed in our theatres almost simultaneously and while I can find some common ground hero-wise, there is none when it comes to style and tone, the former cleverly aligning with lyricist Lorenzo Hart’s natural environs of the stage (i.e. the film is very theatrical with unity of time and place and could easily be a play… and which I now realise is entirely intentional and a nod of respect to the form in which Hart excelled) while the latter is not only about the French New Wave and the making of BREATHLESS (which you will inevitably rewatch the minute the credits roll on NOUVELLE VAGUE… how could you not?), but it is “of” the French New Wave, affectionately borrowing (or stealing, citing the adage “Young artists imitate. Mature artists steal” and attributing it to TS Eliot in the film, while I thought it was from Picasso, and the omniscient interweb tells me it’s from Lionel Trilling, so presumably its provenance is unknown given the consecutive thefts at play?) the frames and flourishes that fixed Godard’s debut feature to the firmament of cinephiles’ favourites. NOUVELLE VAGUE is truly and equivocally and unabashedly about BREATHLESS as its subject matter, and inspired by BREATHLESS for its form, the Latin word ‘spirare’ meaning ‘to breathe’ and being the etymological root of ’to inspire’. Nice, eh?
The influence of Godard and Co (addressed as “cinemaniacs” by their artistic father figure Roberto Rossellini in the film, delightfully, a great cameo which begins with the OG auteur’s address to the writers at Cahiers du Cinema and ends with him asking up-and-comer Godard if he has any money to invest in a new film: independent filmmakers may be the gods of our ungodly world, but they are grafters, first and foremost) is far reaching across time and space, hitting shores decades and miles away and leaving a clear watermark on our favourite film fare today (Quentin Tarantino called his production company A Band Apart in reference to Godard’s BANDE A PART and I think the semi-improvised, whimsical, somewhat deconstructed recent work of Paul Thomas Anderson - including ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER, INHERENT VICE and LICORICE PIZZA - has suckled at the collective breast of La Nouvelle Vague, too).
Certainly part of the tsunami-like power of the New Wave was the very high density of supremely talented filmmakers and artists and thinkers working in close quarters within a small city. It seems you couldn’t swing un chat in Paris in the late 50s/60s without hitting a cinematic hero square in the jaw, the majority of whom began as critics and all of whom had an encyclopaedic knowledge of cinema (Truffaut, Chabrol, Rohmer), although such academic knowhow and intellectual superiority is a prerequisite if you are going to position yourselves as the gods of the form without any humility whatsoever (“Art is not a pastime,” John Cocteau says to Francois Truffaut, “but a priesthood,” which feels prescient given the film sitting squarely in the common area of the Venn diagram of cinematic art and the priesthood is Tom McCarthy’s SPOTLIGHT… 🙄). But while it is true that (even before he’d made a film!) Godard was humility-less, peacocking around Paris in sunglasses and skinny-ties and being something of a massive pain in the arse to all and sundry, Linklater’s portrayal is entirely absent anything but unbridled admiration and appreciation. His affection for Godard is as pure and simple and playful as the mutual affection we first see between Patricia and Michel, although there is absolutely no ultimate betrayal in the case of NOUVELLE VAGUE: Richard Linklater ♥️s Jean Luc Godard… 4evs.
So, Richard Linklater has given us a love letter to Godard (played quite wonderfully by Guillaume Marbeck, a man with loadsa credits, but across every department you can think of in filmmaking and only a few as an actor) and the French New Wave and the great art of directing (“To direct is to aim for intellectual and moral anarchy…”… honestly, get over yerselves!), devoid any cynicism whatsoever and painting his cinematic heroes in a glorious, unfragmented and pure Parisien light. It is a thing of innocence and of beauty. And am I tempted to besmirch it just a teeny-tiny bit and remind us all that most film directors, Godard most definitely included, are entirely unbearable IRL, prone to chronic and incurable arsehole-ism and have egos the size of Notre Dame? Yes, obvs, but I’ll resist the temptation and stick to my resolutions: exactly as Godard hoped to do with BREATHLESS, Linklater has made a film which is simply beautiful, and beautifully simple. Felicitations. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
