New Wave – first-look review

It is iron­ic that Richard Lin­klater has cho­sen to homage a film carved out of spon­ta­neous new tech­niques with one so mired in con­trivances that it is impos­si­ble for it to breathe. To be fair, Breath­less is the name of the game in this black-and-white recon­struc­tion of the mak­ing of Jean-Luc Godard’s first film.

The year is 1959 and Cahiers du Cin­e­ma crit­ic JLG is aware that he is amongst the only of his con­tem­po­raries not to have made a fea­ture film. Claude Chabrol has. Éric Rohmer has. François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows is about to pre­mière at Cannes. (As Nou­velle Vague pre­miered in Cannes, the local audi­ences hoot­ed and hollered.)

JLG wants to make a non-tra­di­tion­al film out of nat­ur­al emo­tions and essen­tial moments, mean­ing that he refus­es to give actors a full script and, lat­er, pio­neers the jump-cut. There is hys­ter­i­cal resis­tance from his financier at every turn while his movie star, Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch), is only pre­vent­ed from pulling out by her man­ag­er hus­band. As we know, JLG was unflap­pably con­fi­dent and Lin­klater arms him with an arse­nal of bon mots that he deploys to silence objec­tions. Guil­laume Mar­beck does an enter­tain­ing imper­son­ation of the famous auteur, per­ma­nent­ly sport­ing dark glass­es and a non­cha­lant drone of a voice.

There are lim­it­ed larks to be found in the ​‘get­ting the band togeth­er’ pro­ce­dur­al ele­ments. A gim­micky approach to intro­duc­ing all crea­tures great and small los­es its charm faster than you can say ​“girl and a gun”. Fresh from Otto Preminger’s Bon­jour Tristesse, Seberg is famous and scep­ti­cal. Untest­ed box­er, Jean-Paul Bel­mon­do (Aubry Dullin) is fresh and game. MVP is Matthieu Penchi­nat as DoP Raoul Coutard. Asked in ref­er­ence to a spe­cif­ic shot com­po­si­tion if he has seen Ing­mar Bergman’s Sum­mer Inter­lude he replies with total sin­cer­i­ty, ​“No, I was in Viet­nam.” Lin­klater is aware of the absur­di­ty of mak­ing cin­e­ma your reli­gion when there’s a world of pain out there, and yet in this parish it is a truth we hold to be self-evident.

This is a rare moment where the world beyond the pro­duc­tion of Breath­less is acknowl­edged and it stands out, not because movies about movie-mak­ing are inher­ent­ly lim­it­ed (see Fassbinder’s won­der­ful Beware of a Holy Whore and indeed – sor­ry to JLG – Truffaut’s Day For Night). The prob­lem with mak­ing it the axis here is that the ​‘will they won’t they pull this off?’ cen­tral ten­sion is a moot point. There are no stakes because the des­tiny of Breath­less is a fore­gone con­clu­sion. So enjoy­ment here rests entire­ly upon how much you enjoy his­tor­i­cal reenactments.

Full of inside cin­e­ma jokes while, on the flip side, offer­ing a film his­to­ry 101 class, Lin­klater has not worked through the con­tra­dic­tions in his approach. He pitch­es provo­ca­tions to cinephiles (short films don’t count as films appar­ent­ly!) while under­tak­ing a doomed effort to charge the enter­prise with ten­sion. A Bout de Souf­flé is a canon­i­cal clas­sic anoint­ed as chang­ing the course of cin­e­ma, a fact that drains all mys­tery out of JLG’s posi­tion with­in this sto­ry as a young, untest­ed upstart.

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