Catch a Wave

On Richard Linklater's Nouvelle Vague

Since Breathless was a French attempt to make an American movie, it’s perfectly fitting that the story of its production is an American attempt to make a French movie. Richard Linklater’s blissful Nouvelle Vague charts Jean-Luc Godard’s frustration as he tries to move from critic to director—as many of his Cahiers du Cinema colleagues already had—and then the twenty days during which the producer Georges du Beauregard finally gave him his chance. That film’s original title, A bout de souffle--literally At the end of breath--suits the exhausted essence of its two protagonists far better than Breathless. But Breathless may be the better title because that’s how it left audiences, especially the ones who were anything but exhausted, who felt renewed, ready to take to the streets with their own cameras and their own stories when they saw Godard blow away the established method of making movies like so much chaff.

When I first heard about Linklater’s movie something in me expected it to be a disaster. How do you recreate spontaneity? But shooting in the same square aspect ratio that Godard used, and with cinematographer David Chambille using black-and-white film stock that captures the high contrast and sharp yet somehow slightly softened edges Raoul Coutard captured in Breathless, Linklater has avoided making the film the equivalent of a Museum of Natural History diorama. If you re-watch Breathless after seeing Nouvelle Vague, you’ll be amazed at how close the reenacted scenes are to the originals. Gestures, vocal intonations, the rhythm of dialogue are near exact and yet it all feels as if it’s being made up as it went along which, according to the witty and sharp, loving script by Holly Gent and Vincent Palmo Jr., most of it was. This isn’t just a movie about a movie being made on the fly but a movie that itself feels as if it were made on the fly. And that’s why Nouvelle Vague imparts its own sense of freedom. No movie this year has given me more pleasure.