Before Jean-Luc Godard was a filmmaker, he was a film critic. And before that, he was a film fan.
That fandom is part of the ethos of the French New Wave, the groundbreaking cinematic movement of the 1950s and 60s. Yes, those directors rejected the strictures of traditional filmmaking. Yes, they brought new approaches to writing, shooting, editing, and thematic exploration. But, that crew of artists, many of whom came out of the French film magazine “Cahiers du Cinema” – Godard, François Truffaut, Éric Rohmer, and more – also held a deep appreciation for the studio filmmakers of yore. In their eyes, people like Orson Welles, John Ford, and Nicholas Ray deserved more artistic attention than they got. In short, they were kind of the first film bros – and I say that with all the love in the world.
“Breathless,” Godard’s seminal feature debut and the basis for filmmaker Richard Linklater’s fanboy movie of his own, “Nouvelle Vague,” might be the most French New Wave-y film of them all. It’s improvisational and quick, full of what would become its signature jump cuts that so many would go on to copy. It’s also full of references to American noir films of the 40s and 50s (the main character, played by Jean-Paul Belmondo, has an obsession with Humphrey Bogart).
“Nouvelle Vague” has a similar love for the art of the cinema that those French New Wave filmmakers had. But, in terms of its form, it’s not the type of movie you might expect someone to make about “Breathless.”
“Nouvelle Vague” is perfectly well made, well acted, and enjoyable – light, cozy entertainment that will most likely delight cinephiles in its exploration of how one of the most influential films of all time came to be. But it’s more interesting as a historical document than a film. That’s the rub with movies made about the making of masterpieces – you can never escape that comparison.
“Nouvelle Vague” stars Guillaume Marbeck as Godard, beginning just before production on “Breathless” began. You meet all the important players early on as the film unfurls, introduced by name with chyrons as they shoot sultry, very French looks at the camera. We have our stars, Belmondo (Aubry Dullin) and American actress Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch). Then you have the rest of the crew, made up of people like producer Georges de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfürst), cinematographer Raoul Coutard (Matthieu Penchinat), assistant director Pierre Rissient (Benjamin Clery), and many more.
Linklater doesn’t do anything too formally inventive with “Nouvelle Vague.” It’s far more observational, watching a masterpiece in the works, but not evoking too much of the way the masterpiece was made. In that sense, the most fun that comes from “Nouvelle Vague” is the tension between how important we understand “Breathless” to be and how everyone making the film felt about it.
Godard worked unconventionally, to say the least. In the film, he writes the script on the fly. He has a distaste for rehearsal, intent on making everything feel real. If he couldn’t think of anything else interesting to shoot that day, he would just quit and tell everyone to go home, infuriating his producers. They didn’t shoot “Breathless” with sync sound recording, so Godard could feed his actors lines on the fly as he wished.
The actors and crew are perplexed by Godard at first, particularly in how he affects their jobs. The poor script supervisor – without a script to supervise, and in the care of a director who doesn’t care a whit about continuity – has nothing to do. Because of Godard’s taste for realism, Seberg’s makeup artist also has nothing to do. But, as the film goes on, most start to go with the flow.
When Godard asks Raoul (Penchinat giving quietly the steadiest, funniest performance in the film) if he can fit in a postal cart in order to get the famous shot of Belmondo and Seberg walking down the Champs-Élysées, he non-chalantly answers yes. He’s used to Godard pushing him around in a wheelchair as a makeshift dolly – what difference will a postal cart make? Many scenes in “Breathless” were shot outside in front of real people, not extras, which caused a bit of a stir. During his death scene, Belmondo runs down the street, assuring people on the sidewalk that he’s not really dying and asking them to please refrain from looking at the camera. When he’s laying on the ground, a police officer hurries to the scene to make sure everything is alright.
The prickliest person on set (besides Georges de Beauregard, who’s as harried a producer as they come), is Seberg, who is not used to Godard’s style and often vocally opposes it. She might be the loudest, but everyone feels a little bit like the movie will flop. With that tension, and the movie’s lack of desire to dive into Godard’s psyche, “Nouvelle Vague” becomes one of your classic Linklater hangout movies, just with a new setting. As everyone starts to become more and more convinced that the film will fail, they don’t get more frazzled, but rather lighten up. People hang out in a cafe all day, waiting for Godard to come up with something to shoot. Belmondo and Seberg flirt incessantly, or mockingly imitate Godard’s style of directing when he has to film his own cameo. The whole mentality becomes, we’re going to fail: we might as well have some fun. And you, the audience, get the little twinkle that comes from knowing they’re all wrong.
If it feels like I’m listing off things that happened during the making of “Breathless,” it’s because that is sort of what “Nouvelle Vague” feels like. It’s frothy, it’s fun, and for people who care about this sort of thing (AKA, me), you might learn something new about one of the most important films in history. It won’t demand your attention like “Breathless,” but it’s a perfectly enjoyable companion if you need one.