Sixty-five years in the making, the first great cinema release of the year, Richard Linklater’s love letter to the revolutionary magic of the French New Wave and a homage to Jean-Luc Godard’s influential 1960 film, A Bout de Souffle, NOUVELLE VAGUE captures the youthful dynamism and creative chaos of that landmark production.
A Bout de Souffle, or Breathless as it is alternatively known, was a deliberate dive into danger by its great individualist creator, and surfaced as a cause celeb of world cinema.
After writing for Cahiers du cinéma, young Godard decided making films is the best film criticism. He gets a producer, Beauregard, to fund a low-budget feature, creating a treatment with Truffaut about a gangster couple. It’s a bow to Bogart, a homage to Hollywood genre, yet fresh and unique in technique.
Godard manufactured another level of reality with A Bout de Souffle, where actors were encouraged to reveal their true self within the character. Shooting it on location in Paris streets so aligned actors with their characters that all behaviour, attitude, gestures and relations smacked of breathless authenticity.
Like Godard, Linklater is a genuine creator whose achievement is unique, a great individualist but also a supreme collaborator with a cracker cast and crew.
Screenwriters Holly Gent and Vince Palmo have time machined a script that unspools like a documentary of the fictional lives of the two characters as well as the larger than life coterie that manifested in Paris in the period.
Godard said “Who cares if A Bout de Souffle dates? It sums up 1960”. And NOUVELLE VAGUE adds to that sum, director of photography David Chambille uncannily captures a replication and the essence of the time as does production designer Katia Wyszkop and costume designer Pascaline Chavanne.
Jean-Luc Godard is portrayed by Guillaume Marbeck, all undertone made eloquent by deadpan wit, audacious changes in tempo, and persistent narrative zest.
Jean Seberg is resurrected by Zoey Deutch, quizzing, bristling, constantly questioning whether this project will result in career suicide.
And Jean-Paul Belmondo is animated by Aubry Dullin, debonair, nonchalant, blithe of spirit.
NOUVELLE VAGUE is no Europud but a genuine transatlantic triumph, an absorption of cinema history, a palpable hit whereby the end, inarguably, justifies the arrogance.
In Henry IV, Part 1, Prince Hal says to Hotspur “two stars keep not their motion in one sphere”. Everything about NOUVELLE VAGUE places that idea in dispute.
