Richard Linklater is a very versatile director with astonishing range. Most of his pictures have a nervous edge, exhibiting an anxiety that they will tip over into something frankly experimental or avant-garde. The Texas-based filmmaker wants to please the public and has produced audience-pleasing popular films -- for instance, School of Rock. But many of his pictures are so conceptual that they feel a bit abstract and dry: theorems rather than movies -- this was my impression of Boyhood, for instance, a movie so true to life that it was shot over many years so that the actors could age naturally and without make-up or effects. Even films by Linklater that are popular in design, for instance, Dazed and Confused, are often so strangely aimless that they feel like cinema verite or like movies made by a slacker Renoir. Nouvelle Vague is an example of a Linklater film that is so parametric -- that is, circumscribed by rules imposed on the movie -- that it feels like the working-out of a particularly abstract and schematic problem. Shot in black-and-white, the movie feels like a documentary and many sequences have the effect of presenting reality in an austere, strangely inconclusive manner -- the style of a documentary without voice-over or, even, a perceptible point of view and that asks the audience to draw its own conclusions from the material presented. The film's allegiance to the actual facts of events that it dramatizes is obsessive -- actors are cast so that they closely resemble the people actually involved in the material chronicled. Nouvelle Vague is about Jean Luc Godard directing his first feature film, the iconic "New Wave" movie, Breathless (A bout souffle), released in 1959. Raoul Coutard shot the movie for Godard and, as an example of Linklater's fidelity to the facts, the actor cast to play the cameraman looks remarkably like him -- you can check this on Wikipedia. In fact, all the performers look very much like their counterparts in reality -- the actor playing Godard, always wearing sunglasses, is the "spitting image" of the young director. Similarly, the guy who plays Belmondo has the same goofy face with cartoonishly thick lips; Zoey Deutch who impersonates Jean Seberg also looks remarkably similar to the Iowa-born actress. Linklater introduces each person with a major role in the making of Breathless -- generally, he has the person stand motionlessly before the camera while a name is superimposed on the image. Linklater's precision in calling out the names of those involved in the 1959 production extends to make-up artists, the film's editors, and other personnel, including a rogue's gallery for French hustlers involved in wrangling the money necessary for the low-budget feature. Linklater names (and provides portraits of) those contributing to the picture even though they have no real role in his chronicle as to the film's making.
In summary, Godard with colleagues is writing criticism at Cahiers du Cinema. His colleague, Francois Truffaut, has just released The 400 Blows to considerable fame. Godard is jealous and wants to make a feature film himself -- hitherto, he has made some animal documentaries and an industrial movie. He steals money from the till at Cahiers and drives to Cannes to attend the screening of The 400 Blows. Back in Paris, he peddles a script he has written -- this is the film that would turn out to be A Woman is a Woman. No one is interested in his script but he has also written a cheap, little film noir with Truffaut. Truffaut is now famous as a result of The 400 Blows and, therefore, bankable; similarly, Claude Chabrol, also a Cahiers critic, has released a New Wave film, also a hit with audiences, and he agrees to serve as adviser on the movie that will be a free adaptation of the crime script written by Truffaut. A producer named Beauregarde (they call him "Beau - Beau") puts up some money and establishes a 20 day shooting schedule. Linklater's film then shows Godard assembling his cast and crew and shooting the movie -- each day is marked by a title on the screen, that "Day One", "Day Two", and so on. Godard wants his actors to improvise and won't tell them their lines until the morning that their scenes will be shot. (Seberg has just worked with the highly dictatorial Otto Preminger and she's horrified and uncomfortable with Godard's minimalist direction.) Godard works casually, often calling a stop to production after only afew set-ups and, sometimes, not working at all. Beau-Beau is afraid that his money will be lost and he and Godard get into a slapstick physical scuffle. Despite the shambolic aspect of Godard's location-shooting, he is very much in control of the production and, in fact, finishes the movie on time and, apparently, within its budget. Seberg, who is on the brink of an affair with Belmondo, departs from France to make a Hollywood movie, relieved to escape from the production. (She despises Godard.) Linklater's movie ends with Godard directing the police confrontation and shooting with which the movie begins -- this footage requires only Godard to direct and Belmondo with a couple of extras. Godard sets Belmondo running across a huge field and neglects to yell "cut" so the actor just keeps running. The movie is finished and screened for its crew and cast; some people are baffled by the film's raw quality, the jump cuts, and intentionally ugly mise-en-scene; others are proud dthat they have worked on what they think is a masterpiece. Here the movie ends -- there's no payoff as to the film being acclaimed by audiences and critics although a title tells us that the world regarded the movie as the most pure form of the French New Wave, its most characteristic picture, and one of the most influential films in the cinema history. But none of this is dramatized.
The peculiarity of Linklater's picture is best measured but what is not in the movie. There are no explicit backstage romances and, in fact, the implied attraction between Belmondo and Seberg is merely a hint. (Seberg has her bossy husband with her to supervise her career activities.) The film's production is without any real crises. Everything goes according to Godard's sketchy but, apparently, adequate plans. There is no backstory about any of the characters -- they are defined by their role in the making of the movie. There's no suspense and no drama. Godard is a complete enigma -- he seems to have no private life at all. We see him steal some money from the Cahiers' cash drawer but the act has no consequences. He gives some self-mythologizing interviews but it's seems evident that he's just making up the incidents from his past. He eats, breathes and sweats cinema and his dialogue consists almost entirely of enigmatic aphorisms about film. We don't know where he lives or whether he has a girlfriend -- we never see his eyes; they are always hidden by dark glasses even when he attends movie screenings. There is no conflict on the set -- people do what Godard tells them to do and, other than the Keystone Kops scuffle with Beau-Beau, everyone gets along professionally. Seberg's loathing for Godard is expressed to her husband but no one else. Godard proclaims that everything about a film should be astonishing and unexpected -- but Linklater's movie is very orderly and lucid; it's predictable to the point of perversity. Linklater doesn't direct in the style of early Godard: there are no sudden bursts of unmotivated music, no weird punning titles, very few jump cuts or sequences that are either way too short or way too long. The sound track is diegetic, consisting of rather smarmy pop and rock and roll tunes played in bars or on the set. Godard doesn't fear failure but is supremely confident that he will be able to complete the movie on-time. The great puzzle about this movie, a very interesting film if you know Breathless and Godard, is why it was made in the first place. I don't see that it adds anything to Breathless nor does it help us to better understand Godard. I liked the movie because I'm interested in Godard. I think that if you don't share my interest, you will be baffled by this picture. Linklater puts in reel markers, although, of course, contemporary films so far as I know aren't projected in reels but somehow displayed digitally -- about every twenty minutes, a mark will flash on the screen signaling that the projectionist should get ready to change the reel -- this is a homage to the way movies were projected in the early 1960's and, of course, before. I don't know the intent of this film and it haunts me that I can't account for why the picture should even exist.
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