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Nouvelle Vague

This opening screening of the Perth Festival's Lotterywest Film season is a cinephile's delight. It documents the production of Jean-Luc Godard's seminal feature debut, À Bout de Souffle (or Breathless). The title refers to the New Wave of French film from the beginning of the 1960s, which railed against the tired, old ways of film-making.

Nouvelle Vague actually looks like it was shot on film, it's riddled with scratch marks, there's are many big black dots indicating the end of the reel, and of course, it's in black and white. The director, Richard Linklater, is obviously a huge fan of Breathless. This is a lovingly made, breezy film, that isn't terribly hard-hitting or deep, but is a fine background to one of the classics.

The casting is excellent, specifically the Jeans; Godard, Seberg and Belmondo, played by Guillaume Marbeck, Zoey Deutch and Aubry Dullin respectively. They all look the part and turn in performances just the right side of parody. Godard does come off as very pretentious, always spouting quotes, never removing his sunglasses, but Seberg pokes holes in his superciliousness.

Linklater has included an exhaustive roll-call of New Wave players: writer/directors François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Agnès Varda, cinematographer Raoul Coutard, producer Georges de Beauregard and many other, presumably accurate, cast and crew of Breathless.

I really enjoyed this film but a word of warning comes in the following conversation I had with Roly after the screening:

Me: "This is great if Breathless is one of your favourite films. It's probably still in my all time top ten."

Roly: "Well, for me, it was like watching a U2 concert film - it's only really interesting if you like the band."

Ouch. But I reckon it has merit, even if you don't know or love the source work. Just seeing 1960s Paris in monochrome might satisfy a lot of people.

Nouvelle Vague runs until Nov 30th at the Somerville UWA.

See also:

Certainly, Godard's À Bout de Souffle (or Breathless) (1960) and Benedict Andrews' Seberg (2019) is an interesting look at the shit that might have caused Jean Seberg's sad, early death at age 40.

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