Five Reasons To Watch Nouvelle Vague, Richard Linklater’s Love Letter to Jean-Luc Godard

Richard Linklater is on a tear. This summer, the Texan director is releasing two films two weeks apart, both dealing with transitional moments in the history of 20th-century storytelling. At the same time, he’s developing an adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along, a reverse-chronology musical that he plans to shoot over two decades, wrapping around 2040.

 But first off the mark is Nouvelle Vague, which has been nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy and shortlisted at the Academy Awards for cinematography, ahead of official nominations being announced next month.

 The film is a tribute to Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 debut, Breathless (À Bout de Souffle), and the artistic milieu that produced it. Though it’s become a modern cinematic touchstone, Linklater treats it with an easygoing naturalism that, it turns out, is well-suited to the hijinks going on behind the scenes. Godard’s methods were famously unconventional, and at times incomprehensible to those working alongside him – none of his collaborators could have predicted that they were working on one of the most influential films of the century. As his subjects scramble, Linklater captures the pandemonium with verve.

 Here are five reasons to see it, before the director’s next film drops.

It’s a window on a turning point in cinema history

As the name suggests, Nouvelle Vague isn’t simply a portrait of a young Godard, or a “making of”. Instead, its purview is an entire movement: the cinematic revolution initiated by a set of upstart young film critics – Godard and his fellow writers-turned-directors François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol and Éric Rohmer – taking their theory of “the auteur” beyond the pages of a magazine and attempting to realise it onscreen. The French New Wave sought to create a spontaneous, impressionistic new cinema that would disrupt expectations and capture the youthful energy of the times. Although it’s preceded by Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and Agnès Varda’s La Pointe Courte, no New Wave film would better exemplify the movement than Godard’s Breathless, nor have the same lasting impact on popular culture.

It captures the chaos and spark of a daring shoot

Nouvelle Vague takes place in 1959, when The 400 Blows, Truffaut’s landmark first feature, is screening at Cannes and a 28-year-old Godard is feverishly hustling to catch up with his friend. He convinces producer Georges de Beauregard to fund the project that will become Breathless, on the proviso that he’ll shoot it in 20 days. He has no script or storyboard, just a sketch developed by Truffaut about a cool, disaffected young fugitive and his ill-fated affair with an American expat. Godard assembles a skeleton crew and dives into an outlandish, seat-of-his-pants production, with no sets, no lighting, no live sound and very little budget. In keeping with the New Wave commitment to a lyrical, improvisatory style, he writes each scene ahead of the shoot, giving the actors their lines on the go (it will all be overdubbed later), and works only when inspired – which, some days, means not at all. One afternoon, a frazzled Beauregard, fearful his investment is going down the gurgler, scuffles with the director when he finds him idling in a cafe. The whole affair is a crapshoot and, in Linklater’s hands, it’s also very funny, the American relishing the anarchic process behind Godard’s cinematic alchemy.

It’s a stylish evocation of mid-century Paris

Where Godard’s method was (deliberately) shambolic, Linklater’s is painstaking and elegant. The latter’s first foreign-language film, Nouvelle Vague was written in English, borrowing from a number of Godard’s interviews and writings, then translated into French. Cinematographer David Chambille shot it in high-contrast black and white, using a classic 4:3 aspect ratio in an echo of Godard’s original; the makers have even inserted old-fashioned projectionist’s cues in the corner of the screen. The period details are meticulously reconstructed, from music to costuming and sets, and much of the action takes place in the same boulevards and cafes where Godard’s crew worked in 1959. Linklater’s attention to detail extends as far as extras who were chosen to resemble background figures from Breathless – passers-by caught in the frame during filming on Paris’s busy streets, as Godard pushed his cinematographer along in a wheelchair, or concealed in a postal cart. The result is a naturalistic, documentary-style feature that conjures the French filmmaker’s irreverent, modernist flair.

Its ensemble cast is full of rising stars

Linklater is known for his patient casting and rehearsal process, and the actors portraying Nouvelle Vague’s band of historical characters – which includes not just Godard’s film crew and his New Wave colleagues, but Robert Bresson, Jean Cocteau and Roberto Rossellini – were deftly selected. Guillaume Marbeck is splendid as the impish and often infuriating Godard, bringing physicality and a hint of self-parody to the role. Zoey Deutch was apparently earmarked for the role of Jean Seberg more than 10 years ago – now she’s nominated for Best Supporting Performance at the Independent Spirit Awards for this role. More accustomed to Hollywood’s machine-like professionalism, and coming off a bad experience on the set of Bonjour Tristesse, Seberg is exasperated by Godard’s laissez-faire approach; she has to be talked out of quitting more than once – though, in time, this will become her most celebrated performance. The quickfire energy between actors transcends imitation and is decidedly fun to watch.

It’s a homage to one auteur by another

Linklater is also known for his naturalistic style, preferring dialogue, long arcs and heightened moments over conventional plotting. Perhaps most famously, his coming-of-age epic, Boyhood, was shot incrementally over 12 years to show how experience slowly shapes a child into an adult. This careful big-picture thinking no doubt helps Linklater give a historical feature like Nouvelle Vague its jolt of authenticity. It probably also helps that Linklater’s entry to cinema mirrors that of Godard and his peers. Like them, he came to the industry as an outsider, given he wasn’t a film school grad, but a cinephile. And since the release of his first feature in 1990, he has mostly avoided entanglement with the big Hollywood studios. Instead, he followed his own wildly divergent paths, from the freeform hang-out comedy Slacker, to the Before romance trilogy, to the rotoscope experiment Waking Life. In this way, Linklater seems like a natural heir to the New Wave auteurs, whose chief imperatives were subversion and independence, both financial and creative. In seeking to remake cinema as a democratic art form, they opened the way for innumerable filmmakers and Nouvelle Vague is a loving tribute to that legacy.

Nouvelle Vague comes to Australian cinemas from January 8.

This article is produced by Broadsheet in partnership with Transmission Films.