Richard Linklater’s new film Nouvelle Vague is a love letter to French cinema. It’s a love letter to his heroes—and one in particular, director Jean-Luc Godard, who made him want to make films and believe that he could. It’s also a love letter to movies, the thrill of making them and the joy and magic they bring into our lives.
Linklater’s concept was to recreate the making of Godard’s debut film, his 1960 masterpiece Breathless, about a small-time thief who wants to be Humphrey Bogart and the pretty américaine he falls for, the beguiling Bonnie to his hapless Clyde. But Linklater didn’t only set out to document Godard’s filmmaking process. He insisted on telling the story, “in the style and spirit in which Godard made Breathless.”
The concept is irresistible, especially to people who love the French New Wave. The movement dreamed up by five film critics-turned-filmmakers at the legendary French magazine Cahiers du Cinéma—Godard, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, and Jacques Rivette—seized the film world by the heart and mind and changed filmmaking forever. They set out to break with the studio system and find a way to inexpensively (and with great flair) make movies that tapped into a revolutionary spirit of youthful irreverence, creativity, and a mad, unquenchable desire to make art unlike anything that came before. They tossed the rules out the window and told stories their own way. And it worked! Scores of acclaimed films resulted from the unlikely experiment. The work of these rebels went on to influence other would-be filmmakers worldwide, Linklater included, and a wildfire spread, inspiring creative people with a story to tell to grab a camera—and later, a phone—and make movies.
Behind the Scenes of Breathless
Breathless was the perfect movie to focus on in Nouvelle Vague. Ask people to name a New Wave film and it’s the first that comes to mind for many. It’s bold, dynamic, funny, original, smart, captivating, and universally adored, taking a story told in a million Hollywood thrillers and turning it into something fresh and unexpected. It’s heady, stylish, and easier to understand than some of the more cerebral New Wave projects, including Godard’s more cryptic later works. Godard himself is the poster boy for the French New Wave, an energetic young man with a big brain bursting with big ideas who grew into a grumpy old guy who made movies until his last breath.
Nouvelle Vague opens with the gang—Godard (Guillaume Marbeck), François Truffaut (Adrien Rouyard), Claude Chabrol (Antoine Besson) and their colleague Suzanne Schiffman (Jodie Ruth-Forest)— watching a movie. In Linklater’s film, every time a character based on a real person is introduced, their name appears under their static portrait, a technique sure to delight New Wave fans, especially because he cast almost exclusively unknown actors who look just like the historical figures they are playing.
Godard is feeling left out. The Cahiers crew vowed to move from critiquing movies to making them, and he still hadn’t. At this point, Chabrol had made two features, which hurt, but what pushes Godard to desperation is his frenemy, Truffaut’s, universally acclaimed film The 400 Blows. Broke, but feeling the FOMO, Godard pinches some francs from the Cahiers kitty and zips off to the Cannes Film Festival to attend the premiere, where he never takes off his sunglasses—and Truffaut wins the prize for Best Director. The pressure is on!
Godard convinces producer George Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfürst) to take on the project. He has a few ideas and goes with the easiest sell: a sparse outline Truffaut wrote for a true crime story about a small-time thief running from the law who hooks up with the femme fatale of his dreams. Godard casts Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dillon), a hunky would-be actor he knows for the part that will make him a star, and woos American actor Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch), who’s having a starry moment after her recent turn in Otto Preminger’s Bonjour Tristesse, and forever whining in American-accented français about wanting to quit.
The heart of the film is the 20-day shoot, which is entertaining for the audience and maddening for everyone on screen. Godard hires Raoul Coutard (Matthieu Penchinat) as his cameraman, because he worked taking documentary footage of the French Indochina War and Godard wants his film to have a freewheeling cinema vérité look and feel. So much is improvised, bringing a sense of freedom and spontaneity to the shoot. For Godard, it was about living in the moment, turning filmmaking into a jazz performance. Instead of writing an actual script or even fleshing out Truffaut’s story, every morning he jots down a few lines of dialogue and shows up on set to boss people around. Cut to: Belmondo laughing—he’s just Godard being Godard—and Seberg swearing that today she really is quitting!
Godard basically makes it up as he goes. Some days he shoots two takes of a scene and says, “That’s a wrap!” Some days he’s uninspired and sends everyone home without doing any work at all. Other days he lounges in a café to let the genius juices simmer. Often he plays pinball or does handstands. Most days Seberg stomps out in a huff, and his producer throws a fit. Once, he and Godard come to blows.
A Film for Filmmakers
Linklater never planned to recreate Breathless. He wanted to dive into that time and place—Paris, 1959—and hang out with the French New Wave crew. I saw the movie at a press screening at the New York Film Festival in a theater packed with people like me, most of whom know the French New Wave films well and love them fiercely. We are protective of these films, these people, and we went into the dark hoping Linklater had been kind to them. And he is kind to them—maybe a little too kind. Godard comes off as a trickster, an energetic, playful rascal driven by ambition and creativity, who wants to prove to the world that he can make movies, too. He doesn’t care if he’s wasting his cast’s time or his producer’s money. He’s arrogant, stubborn, and inflexible. But in the film, he smiles while pissing people off. He’s sweet, warm and fuzzy even, and I had to wonder if the famously cantankerous Godard was ever actually this adorable.
Honestly, I don’t know if people who aren’t obsessed with the French New Wave will appreciate the film. Hollywood always loves movies about making movies, but this one gives us little more than the movie making, without any of the off-screen sex, drama, or debauchery of, say, Day for Night (directed by Truffaut) or Living in Oblivion. Seberg talks to her husband about how much she hates working with Godard, but otherwise it’s all stunts on the cheap and shoving the cameraman into a mail cart with a hole in it, so they can use passersby as free extras.
From minute one, I was geeking out. Dropping into Paris, 1959, reproduced to perfection, to hang out with Godard and the gang shooting one of my favorite movies is magical. We’re there when Seberg meets Belmondo! We’re there when Godard is hitting up the great filmmakers he knows for advice! Jean Cocteau tells him, “Art is not a pastime, but a priesthood.” Roberto Rosellini lectures the Cahiers crowd about the urgency of cinema. The great thriller director Jean-Pierre Melville promises to introduce him to some car thieves. We see historical films all the time with actors playing people who existed. Why does this feel different? We’re dropped right into this exquisite moment in history, a filmmaker making a work of art that he and his crew don’t know yet is going to change cinema forever.
I want to say watching this movie with a room full of film critics and afficionados made me feel like a kid in a candy store, but it actually reminded me of taking my son to children’s theater when he was little. The lights would go down and the stage would come to life. The entire room would hum with awe and delight. All those little eyes would go wide. Something magical was happening. Of course, the theater was packed that day at the Walter Reade Theater in New York, as the screen lit up, revealing the faces of these people who made so many of the movies we love. Everyone laughed a little too hard, oohing and aahing at the actors who looked so much like Belmondo… Truffaut… Godard… the audience gasping in delight, waiting breathlessly for our favorite moments. This room of cinephiles was full of the warm feelings only the French New Wave can inspire, jolted back to the moment when we first fell in love ourselves with the kind of challenging films that make us think and dream.
On screen, the crew, actors, producers, and Godard are all anxious. No one knows how this is going to work out. Finally, Godard throws up his arms and says, “Come on, let’s make movie history!” And who could ever say no to Godard?
Nouvelle Vague opens in theaters on Friday, October 31st, and will stream on Netflix from Friday, November 14th.
Andrea Meyer has written creative treatments for commercial directors, a sex & the movies column for IFC, and a horror screenplay for MGM. Her first novel, Room for Love (St. Martin’s Press) is a romantic comedy based on an article she wrote for the New York Post, for which she pretended to look for a roommate as a ploy to meet men. A long-time film and entertainment journalist and former indieWIRE editor, Andrea has interviewed more actors and directors than she can remember. Her articles and essays have appeared in such publications as Elle, Glamour, Variety, Time Out NY, and the Boston Globe.
