1 of 5 | Zoey Deutch and Guillaume Marbeck star in “Nouvelle Vague,” on Netflix Friday. Photo courtesy of Netflix
If French New Wave films sound like boring old foreign movies, then one should really watch a few to see how much fun they can be. Viewers could also check out Nouvelle Vague, in theaters now and on Netflix Friday, which shows what a romp filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard had with cinema.
Guillaume Marbeck plays Godard in Nouvelle Vague, which opens in 1959 France. Godard, just shy of 30 years old at the time, dreams of becoming a film director like his colleagues Francois Truffant (Adrien Rouyard) and Claude Chabrol (Antoine Besson). With his debut feature, Breathless, Godard wants to break all the rules, and he does.
Even at its most anarchic, Breathless belies the rebellion Godard was enacting. The film’s 90 minutes only show the footage he captured, but his methods behind the scenes were even more threatening to the status quo.
Godard didn’t want to write a script because once actors memorized lines, he felt they became mechanical. Star Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch) in particular would prefer to prepare for a scene, rightfully cautious about how she’d come across Godard’s way.
Seberg also bristles at Godard’s filming without sound, planning to dub the dialogue in later. This means Godard can speak to her and co-star Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin) during takes, giving new direction while the camera is rolling.
For his part, Belmondo seems to just roll with it. He’s making an anarchic movie with an anarchic director, and all the antics amuse him.
The film they are making, Breathless, is ostensibly about a criminal on the run played by Belmondo. He romances a journalism student played by Seberg but the film eschewed the traditional outlaw plot to focus on their random conversations instead.
This was rebellious against Hollywood and even world cinema upon its release in 1960, but Nouvelle Vague shows Godard as the avant-garde rebel during production and in daily life, too. Breathless can also be meandering if one isn’t vibing with it, but Nouvelle Vague provides constant conflict.
In his obsession with breaking the rules, Godard even rejects scene continuity. He wraps production early on several days, leaving financiers unsatisfied that he has produced enough footage.
There is only one scene featuring Godard’s editors, who must navigate him breaking the most traditional rules of form. But, that’s very technical, so Nouvelle Vague dramatizes it enough to show he is telling the editors to go directly against their training.
Director Richard Linklater films Nouvelle Vague in the style of Breathless, in black and white and in the same aspect ratio. He also films Holly Gent, Vincent Palmo Jr. and Michèle Petin’s script in French with English subtitles.
Many giants of French cinema are portrayed in the film, and they are identified with on screen text, which seems like something Godard would do and probably did in other films. Characters often stand in center frame looking directly in camera, as Godard definitely did.
Nouvelle Vague shows how Godard achieved what was revolutionary cinematography at the time. He stuffs his cinematographer in a car trunk or a postal cart.
Fans of Breathless will recognize moments alluded to in Nouvelle Vague. In Breathless, Godard opts to represent a car crash with only audio but Nouvelle Vague shows him filming the stunt he cut from the film.
Despite all this, Breathless stands as one of the more linear of Godard’s oeuvre. If Nouvelle Vague turns viewers onto Breathless and they want to delve deeper, try 1967’s Weekend, where Godard goes on even more unrelated tangents and breaks the fourth wall.
Linklater himself was part of a major film movement of American independent cinema in the ’90s. His debut Slacker laid the groundwork for films about characters talking about their lives, which Kevin Smith cites as a direct influence on Clerks.
Before Sunrise went further, following two characters for the entire film, then catching up with them twice more in sequels. Even Dazed and Confused, a small studio film, is a landmark of ensemble dialogue, and it is co-produced by Alphaville Films, a company named after a Godard film.
Linklater has an intuitive understanding of rebellious filmmaking. His populist sensibilities make his tribute to Godard’s breakthrough accessible to modern audiences and shows how much fun those art films can be at their best.
Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.
