‘Nouvelle Vague’ Review: Richard Linklater’s Empty Tribute to the French New Wave
‘Nouvelle Vague’ may be Avengers: Endgame for the Cahiers du Cinéma crowd, but the film is devoid of any substance beyond the aesthetic recreations of one of the most groundbreaking motion pictures that forever changed our conception of cinema.
“The most detestable habit in all of modern cinema is the homage.” These were the words spoken by Orson Welles at a conference in Paris, a few years before his passing. Truer words have never been spoken by this controversial figure, who spent his lifetime revolutionizing the art form of cinema and changing the way we look at movies forever. There’s nothing an audience member learns from a well-intentioned “homage” or “love letter” to a certain filmmaker, or, perhaps, an entire movement, since all you do is copy from someone else, without examining the significance of that once-daring formal approach in your pastiche.
Sadly, this is Richard Linklater’s modus operandi in the horrendous Nouvelle Vague, a technical exercise entirely reliant on homages, without ever understanding the “why” behind the Cahiers du Cinéma’s revolution, where film critics such as François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Éric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette rejected the norms of traditional filmmaking and sought out to create a total shift in the ways movies were shot, edited, and even spoke about the future of the medium within the pictures themselves. There’s a lot to explore to make the audience aware of the tectonic change that occurred after the release of Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, but, most importantly, Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, which rejected everything cinema perpetuated up to this point and created an entirely new language out of its relentless desire not to give the audience what they want.
Godard (played by Guillaume Marbeck) wanted cinema to move away from an obsession on quality, as Michel Dorsday so brilliantly expressed within the Cahiers: “Le cinéma français est mort. Mort sous la qualité, l'impeccable, le parfait [...] On ne fait plus en France que de bons films, fabriqués, léchés, présentés avec élégance. Et c'est là le désastre.” (“French cinema is dead. Dead under the weight of quality, the impeccable, perfect [...] In France, all that's made anymore are good films, manufactured, polished, and presented with elegance. And that's a disaster.”) Truffaut was the first to describe the “tradition of quality” the Cahiers wanted to reject within its “politique des auteurs,” where the filmmaker becomes the author of the work they make, and no one else. No producer will meddle in their affairs as they seek to create works that speak to them, and them only.
The filmmaker should have total freedom to do what they want, because the director will create a singular body of work that is their own, and can’t be appropriated by other people. These are essential elements to discuss in Linklater’s film, which he strangely refuses to do. In stead, he’s far too busy name-dropping as many figures as he can from French – and world cinema – such as Roberto Rossellini, Jean-Pierre Melville, Robert Bresson, Agnès Varda, Suzanne Schiffman, Jean Cocteau, and even Kassagi, who starred in Bresson’s Pickpocket, without giving the audience a sense of the importance of the Cahiers (they remain the foremost reference in critical writing on cinema), and the plates that are about to shift once Godard releases Breathless to the world.
There are many discussions Godard has with producers Pierre Rissient (Benjamin Clery) and Georges de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfürst) about the potential risk that a project like this could pose to the producers backing him. Yet, Linklater, alongside screenwriter Holly Gent and Vincent Palmo, never excavates beyond the surface of what is presented. It tracks the making of Breathless with the same stylistic flourishes as Raoul Coutard’s free-flowing camera without ever demonstrating why these techniques were revolutionary, why it was a big deal to keep continuity errors intact, why cutting within the scenes (as opposed to in between them) created discordant jump-cuts and had a different effect than the “illusion” of reality (and why this was also important in its own right). Most essentially, it never answers the central question of why Breathless, and, by extension, the French New Wave, changed the art of filmmaking and cinephilia as a whole forever.
It perplexes me why so many Western critics are appreciating this empty exercise that refuses to give audiences an idea of Godard’s own conception of cinema, because, as a polarizing figure as he may be (especially in his late stage), his view of the world, art, and movies was always fascinating. Having the privilege to create an entire film in his style should allow Linklater and director of photography David Chambille to question the reasoning behind his madness.Yet, there’s nothing the movie offers beyond recreations of things people who have seen – and loved – Breathless will recognize in an instant, almost like the “coincidences” we see in far too many musical biopics (think of the “Mansion on a Hill” moment in Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere).
In many respects, Nouvelle Vague is the Avengers: Endgame for Cahiers du Cinéma fans, but since those who usually skew towards Godard and the French New Wave tend to dislike Marvel (I seem to be the exception to the rule, but I like all types of cinema, from the crowd-pleasing to the esoteric), who is this movie for? Cahiers fans certainly won’t play the game of “point and clap” at elements they recognize from the movement if they consistently call out this practice in Marvel movies, so is there anyone who will get something out of an experience that refuses to be curious about the very thing it is ripping off from?
I don’t want to speak for the dead. Still, there’s an absolute certainty that the first person, if he were alive today, who would eviscerate this movie would be Godard himself. After all, he hated imitations of his style (and himself, though Marbeck is surprisingly good here) more than anything he found in modern cinema. Linklater certainly has nailed the recreations down to a tee, but that’s the only element he offers in this cyclical 104-minute affair that’s too busy replicating the aesthetics of the French New Wave, with none of the formal daring as Godard’s own work, than saying something out of this entire movement (even the end credits text summing up the cultural impact of Breathless seems far too facile for Linklater’s own standards).
Even the presence of Jean Seberg (played by Zoey Deutch), a radical figure in both politics and cinema, is reduced to an object rather than the three-dimensional, complex person she was. Deutch herself is terribly miscast as the actress/activist, while everyone else at least gives impassioned imitations of the people they should theoretically represent (credit where credit is due: it is frightening how much Aubry Dullin looks like Jean-Paul Belmondo).
Maybe people who have seen, but not really understood, Breathless, will sing Nouvelle Vague’s praises, since it scratches the “love letter” itch, but the ones who have read extensively about it may think it is devoid of any meaning or reasoning behind making a movie about the most radical shift in cinema through the most conventional approach. When it became clear that Nouvelle Vague didn’t have much to say about the movement, Breathless itself, and the broader implications it had in cinema history, a few people in the auditorium walked out. If that’s not a scathing indictment of Linklater’s inability to parse something, anything, out of the period he’s recreating, what is?