COMIC DRAMA; 1hr 46min (French with subtitles, English)
STARRING: Guillaume Marbeck, Zoey Deutch, Aubry Dullin
French connection: Deutch and Marbeck
Director Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague is about the revolutionary birth of French New Wave cinema via the film-making likes of François Truffaut (Adrien Rouyard) and Jean-Luc Godard (Marbeck). Essentially, though, it’s about the self-belief it takes to launch yourself, with the nonchalance only the French could finesse, into the unknown.
In 1959, 28-year-old Godard and his workmates Truffaut and Claude Chabrol (Antoine Besson) are critics for film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, tap-tap-tapping away on manual typewriters. Unlike the others, frustrated auteur Godard has never directed a movie — unless you count short films, which he emphatically does not.
Brooding behind his omnipresent shades, Godard pockets a few hundred francs from an office drawer and takes himself to the Cannes Film Festival. At Cannes, which has never looked more chic than it does in cinematographer David Chambille’s expressive black-and-white, Godard and a packed house are blown away by a screening of Truffaut’s The 400 Blows.
More obsessed than ever, Godard gets to work adapting Truffaut’s outline about real-life car thief Michel Portail and his girlfriend, American journalist Beverly Lynette. With bare-bones financing from producer Georges “Beau-Beau” de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfürst), and a laissez-faire Jean-Paul Belmondo (Dullin) and unconvinced Jean Seberg (Deutch) cast as the unlucky lovers, the 20-day Breathless shoot is on.
Cineaste Linklater (Boyhood ) wraps this formative time in a lustrous aura of nostalgia. Boundaries are a contradiction in terms for its roll-call of creative greats, with freedom of expression the order of the arbitrary day. As the scattershot Breathless filming kicks into gear, its director, whom nothing appears to rattle, is at once coolly in control and casually all over the scheduling map.
To Beau-Beau’s outrage, in the first two weeks the cast and crew work for eight half days, some of which are two hours long. Their director’s lofty rationale of “[Seizing] reality at random” cuts no moutarde with the bunny whose investment appears to be disappearing down the nearest drain. That Godard didn’t give a toss is fine and dandy through the forgiving lens of hindsight: Breathless emerged as a breakthrough for the ages. But every frame was a seat-of-pants gamble when the camera was rolling.
