Nouvelle Vague Review – Richard Linklater Bends the Knee for Breathless and Jean-Luc Godard | film

forIt is merciless and does not die… and has no meaning? Here is Richard Linklater’s impeccably subdued and tasteful drama about the making of Godard’s 1960 classic debut film À Bout de Souffle, which starred Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo as star-crossed lovers in Paris. Linklater’s homage has French-language credits and is beautifully shot in monochrome, as opposed to the boring old color of real life in which the events were actually happening; He even gently makes up cue marks in the corner of the screen, the things that once told projectionists when to change the reels. But Linklater seamlessly avoids any annoying jump cuts.

It’s a smart, graceful effort, and Godard himself, had he still been alive, would surely have torn Linklater apart with a new effort. (When Michel Hazanavicius directed Redoubtable in 2017 about Godard’s making of his 1967 film La Chinoise, the man himself called it a “stupid, stupid idea”; Hazanavicius wasn’t even making a film about Godard’s first and biggest success.)

However, Linklater is of course, unconsciously creating a stylistic homage – not to Godard, but to his smoother and more accessible collaborator and Hollywood friend François Truffaut. Truffaut wrote the basic story for Breathless, thus giving Godard its commercial success; It was based on a true crime thriller about a tough guy who shoots a cop and runs off an American girlfriend, grabbing for love and romance while he can, existentially aware that the cop killer’s days are numbered.

The real-life characters in Breathless’s story, from the most famous to the most obscure (this last category is of course treated with the strict respect of adult fans) are introduced through still character shots, as they stare into the camera with their names flashing on the screen; Even at the same event, these people are often addressed by their full names with a startling statement about their importance so we know where we are.

Godard himself, a gun-toting critic at Cahiers Du Cinéma who longs to graduate to filmmaking, is played by newcomer Guillaume Marbeck, and is constantly dropping poems, aphorisms and dismissive statements about the subject of cinema – and Godard may have been like that, at least some of the time. Linklater mischievously allows the audience to wonder if Godard will one day remove his sunglasses and have a “pretty librarian” moment, or at least a moment to acknowledge that you shouldn’t watch films through dark glasses. Aubrey Dillon plays Belmondo, while Zoey Deutch plays Seberg, fluent in French and an Ohio accent. Adrien Rouillard is Truffaut, Mathieu Pinchenet is the brilliant cinematographer Raoul Cottard whose news background in war coverage made him an inspired choice for Godard’s adventures in guerrilla filmmaking, Benjamin Cleary is Godard’s first assistant director Pierre Récent, and Bruno Dreiforst is Godard’s long-suffering producer Georges “Bo Bo” Beauregard—whose disagreements with Godard over money led to humiliating physical suffering. A quarrel in a cafe in Paris.

Filming begins, extended with Godard’s moody, arrogant delays to accommodate the real inspiration, with the actors amusingly saying whatever they like to each other and to the imperious director as the camera rolls, because everything will later be dubbed in the studio. Continuity supervisor Suzun Fay (Pauline Bell) crossly tells Godard that his cavalier disregard for matching eye lines in successive shots means an editing problem; Perhaps this is a sign of an impending revolution in film grammar, although Linklater’s Godard has the humility to say that he did not invent the vignettes.

By the end, Godard Linklater is as enigmatic and essentially quiet as he was at the beginning, seething with competitive pain over the success of Truffaut’s The 400 Blows in Cannes and struggling to get into parties and film sets; Again, none of this is inaccurate. But the whole thing is very smooth: a wonderful steady-camera journey through a turbulent historical moment.