Richard Linklater and the new wave of new wave

Directed by American indie stalwart Richard Linklater and shot entirely in French, Nouvelle Vague could come across as indulgent and niche. I hope so. The more indulgent, the nichier the better, say I. But if you love French cinema and love Paris and love À bout de souffle (and let’s face it, if you do the two former, it’s probably due to the brilliance of the latter), then you’ll love Nouvelle Vague. I settled into my seat and realised I was in the sweet spot of my happy place.

If you don’t know the many stories behind À bout de souffle, Linklater’s effortlessly amiable film will fill you in. He describes it as: “The story of Godard making À bout de souffle, told in the style and spirit in which Godard made À bout de souffle.” So there must be some licence taken even if I think everything here is true, or at least it feels that way – which, as Godard himself might say, is all you need for a movie. 

Using mostly unknown French actors, Linklater introduces us to the main instigators of this zeitgeisty mid-century moment, including François Truffaut (Adrien Rouyard), Claude Chabrol (Antoine Besson), Éric Rohmer (Côme Thieulin) and JLG himself (a superbly accurate Guillaume Marbeck, swathed in cigarette smoke and dark glasses) as well as actors Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin) and Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch, fabulous). Then there are what one might term the lesser-known creatives such as cinematographer Raoul Coutard (Matthieu Penchinat) and stills photographer Raymond Cauchetier (Franck Cicurel), whose images were equally instrumental in defining the era.

So, yes, it’s a sort of faux documentary at times: whenever the characters are introduced on screen, they pause for a couple of seconds and stare at the camera in a composed tableau, as if posing for an old-fashioned still photograph, while their names come up on the screen. There’s a whiff of Wes Anderson whimsy here, but the film is nothing like Anderson’s archly American The French Dispatch. Linklater is immersed in the moment, in the spirit of ’59, the better to make us feel the fun of it all, the breezy joie de vivre that’s still instantly conjured up whenever you think of À bout de souffle.

So the film takes us through the agonies of Godard’s jealousy watching his fellow film critics at Cahiers du Cinéma make their film debuts, and his conversations with producer Georges de Beauregard before he launches into the 20-day shoot of À bout de souffle, writing by hand the day’s pages in a cafe every morning (there was never a script), ending the day’s filming when he’s run out of ideas, making it up on the spot, smoking, smoking, smoking, and cutting, cutting, cutting.

But, under Linklater’s worshipful gaze, it all feels like the biggest, boldest adventure, illuminated by the playful machismo of Jean-Paul Belmondo and the stylish beauty of Jean Seberg’s gamine star quality. Linklater re-creates famous lines and scenes from the film, but shoots them from a reverse angle, from Godard and the camera’s point of view, thus throwing new light on images we might have seen many times before, now appearing as fresh as they day they were printed.

There are oodles of cinephilic in-jokes, too, including cameos from contemporary luminaries Roberto Rossellini (Laurent Mothe), Jean-Pierre Melville (Tom Novembre), Robert Bresson (Aurelien Lorgnier), who was making Pickpocket at the time, Jean Cocteau (Jean-Jacques Le Messier) and Juliette Gréco (Alix Benezech). There are quips and quotes, there are delicious movie-making moments capturing how Godard directed his actors and how they moved to his strict instructions.

You don’t have to be an expert in French cinema to love this, though it probably helps. I am, unashamedly, so I don’t know or care, which is why I say I felt like they were making it just for me.

Maybe that (Cannes-do?) spirit of self-starting and rule-breaking appealed to me because, as some of you might know, I’m about to make my first movie as a producer (A Waiter in Paris, based on the memoir by Edward Chisholm), due to be shot partly on the streets of Paris, on a film partly inspired by all this nouvelle vague coolness.

The first night I arrived in Paris to live for a year, as a language assistant in 1991, I went to watch À bout de souffle, for the very first time. My life changed that night, or at least shifted into a different gear. I fell in love, with Paris and with movies. 

So now, watching Godard, his crew and his contemporaries take to the streets in their various contraptions – shopping carts and wheelchairs adapted to get their handheld shots and sense of movement – it rang out again, pushing me into another new gear with what felt like a challenge and a validation, that every now and then cinema can and must be reinvented, injected with fresh visions and personality, the prevailing order given a right run for its money until it is literally out of breath. And that I can do this, go from critic to film-maker.

I’m not directing my movies and, somewhat worryingly, the only guy that looks a bit exasperated in Nouvelle Vague, is the producer character, George de Beauregard, forever fretting that no one’s shooting, or that there’s no script, to the point that he and Godard come to blows and a full-on grapple match on a cafe floor. Is that what I’m signing up for? Worth it for the creation of a classic, I’d say – plus Beauregard went on to produce Cléo de 5 à 7, Une femme est une femme, Le Mépris, Pierrot le fou… I’d take that, if it means I have to roll with the punches.

Then there’s all the music Linklater uses, not just some of the famous Martial Solal soundtrack to Breathless, but also other jazz and French sounds of the time, such as Sacha Distel, Dalida and I’m sure I heard Michel Legrand’s work with Miles Davis from Legrand Jazz, which came out in 1958… then again, I always hear Miles Davis’s trumpet when I see Paris on screen, whether it’s there or not.

And a word, too, for Deutch, the only American actor here (she previously starred in Linklater’s campus film Everybody Wants Some from 2016), playing Jean Seberg and capturing all her American-accented French so perfectly, as well as her haircut and her walk, that jaunt up the Champs-Élysées shouting “New York Herald Tribune,” all her style, dressed in Chanel and exuding the magical, diva quality that made producer Beauregard fork out half the budget on hiring her (see, producer’s instincts are everything).

I don’t usually focus on one film from Cannes, but Nouvelle Vague, playing in Competition, struck me as something special, something new. I didn’t catch them all, this year. For the last 25 years or so, I’ve seen all the Competition films, fearful that I might miss the Palme d’Or winner, but with producing duties taking over this year, I had to do meetings with financiers, listen to co-production and tax credit panels and sit down with sales agents, very important people at Cannes, no doubt.

But as Nouvelle Vague shows, when the history of cinema is told, when they recount the legends of making movies to pass on the baton to a new generation, such as Linklater does here, on screen there are critics, costumiers, cinematographers, actors, writers, script editors, the assistant director. There’s a producer and, briefly, the marketing guy. But there are no sales agents or financiers. 

One might wonder where all this ancestor worship fits in Linklater’s own ever-growing and mutating oeuvre. Now 64, he’s always been a flag bearer for indie film, since his loose-limbed breakthrough Slacker helped define the golden era of ’90s American movie making, compounded by Dazed and Confused and the rather brilliant Before trilogy, starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy across the years, with my favourite being the achingly romantic Before Sunset, taking place in Paris. 

But he’s also had the big hit of School of Rock, as well experimental animation work, and the mighty yet subtle achievement of Boyhood, spanning decades.

He ticks off the styles and the stats with a Godardian appetite, reflecting on the passing of time (his films can take place in a day, or over long periods), ambition (or lack of it) among young people, and the act of artistic creation. His films are often about just hanging out with a bunch of characters, so Nouvelle Vague is right up his boulevard I’d say, as if he’s actually totally disappeared into À bout de souffle while showing it at one of his famous Austin Film Society nights, like the characters in Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo. (Allen himself recently fulfilled a dream of making a film entirely in French, Coup de Chance, though it may prove his last). 

Nouvelle Vague is a “hang out” movie, a chance to transport yourself to a Cahiers editorial meeting, or to the Cinematheque, to a new wave film set, and to the cafes and streets of 1959 Paris, to smoke and drink coffee, to be reminded of youthful arrogance, even if these tweedy French intellos do look a bit like university professors than punk-like rebels. 

Let’s remember that film critics can become great film-makers, because we all love movies after all. Let’s keep cinema sexy and daring, it says, let’s aim high to match the best. Let’s remember what Godard said: “You don’t make a film, the film makes you.” And let’s ride that wave.