Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story
“When is this damn movie going to end?” It’s a question that comes up often at the Cannes Film Festival, where time drags on, films follow one another, and by day nine or so even the best film can feel like an endurance test. Yet it’s rare to hear an on-screen character openly expressing his or her thoughts. In Richard Linklater’s swirling, artfully crafted New Wave, which debuted at Cannes this past weekend, that question is posed by actress Jean Seberg (played by Zoey Deutch) during a particularly difficult period in the making of Breathless (1960), the first feature directed by the celebrated young critic Jean-Luc Godard (Guillaume Marbecq). In time, of course, the finished film would become a sensation; It would serve as a catalyst for the French New Wave, revolutionizing the methods and possibilities of independent filmmaking, turning Godard into a cinema icon, and leaving its mark as one of the greatest and most influential debuts in film history. It would also become Seberg's most significant work after her tragic death in 1979.
None of this had happened yet in the New Wave, however, and Linklater shrewdly avoids viewing this seminal moment through the lens of hindsight. It’s 1959, and Seberg, initially reluctant to get involved, spends much of the shoot venting her frustrations with Godard and Breathless, which, from her Hollywood perspective, looks like a lost, out-of-control silliness. The film has no sets, no artificial lighting, and no synchronized sound. There’s just a girl with a gun and a gangster, played by Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubrey Dullin), who experiments with a joie de vivre that Seberg can’t muster. Godard has no script, instead relying on his friend François Truffaut’s interpretation and ideas that arise before and during shooting; when inspiration runs dry, work stops for the day. He disdains the desire for continuity from scene to scene (“Reality is not continuity!” is one of many aphorisms he shouts at his colleagues) and does not use hackneyed narrative structures.
“Nouvelle Vague,” for its part, has coherence to spare. It’s a behind-the-scenes film in the form of a hangout comedy, and it’s designed to glide as much as possible. Linklater’s film playfully mimics the style of “Breathless”: it’s shot by David Shambil in black and white and in an academic aspect ratio. But its smooth, carefully calibrated rhythms are in many ways unique, and editor Katherine Schwartz avoids any hint of Godardian instability; if there’s a jerky cut anywhere, I didn’t notice it. Overall, Linklater has set himself a fascinatingly contradictory task. He’s created a perfect recreation of a project whose triumph was its complete abandonment of the planned and meticulous—a film that shares the kinetics and spontaneity of “Breathless” without completely succumbing to it. But in this contradiction, Linklater and his actors, most of them newcomers, work wonders – and especially Marbeck, who creates a powerful Godard with just his controlled intonations. Peering out from the dark shadows, he imbues the man’s intellectual cool with a sense of playfulness that is as generous as it is mischievous. This is a carefully calibrated narrative, with stems and details, accompanied by a relentless comic speed; at no point did I want it to end.
Godard’s New Wave colleague Jacques Rivette—one of several cinematic giants who join a cast that includes Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, Jean-Pierre Melville, Roberto Rossellini, Robert Bresson, and Jean Cocteau—proposed that every film is a documentary that makes itself. A film like Breathless, in which Godard brought an element of documentary immediacy to the American gangster film, makes this aphorism clearer than many others. While it makes it difficult to imagine what a documentary about the making of the New Wave might look like, the real world is clearly there, peeking out from every stylized black-and-white frame. But then, it is always there in the films of Linklater, who gently insisted on realism as the essential element of fiction. One of the most surprising experiences of Cannes this year was seeing Cannes itself at the beginning of the New Wave, when Godard and his friends attended the 1959 festival to support the premiere of Truffaut’s landmark debut, The 400 Blows. If they suspect that they will be the heroes of a film playing on the Croisette sixty-six years later, they don’t show it.
At a press conference in Cannes dedicated to the New Wave, a journalist asked Linklater about President Donald Trump's recent announcement of a 100 percent tariff on films shot outside the United States. The director responded: “That's not going to happen
Sourse: newyorker.com
