Nouvelle Vague Falters as a Filmic Facsimile of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless

Upon nearly a week of reflection, it’s unclear who exactly Nouvelle Vague is for. The latest film from American indie stalwart Richard Linklater recounts the making of Breathless—French cinematic deity Jean-Luc Godard’s defining French New Wave picture—from conception to completion in 1959. One could argue that the fairly straightforward biographical approach is meant to act as a primer for those have never once tuned into Turner Classic Movies; on the other hand, rapid-fire references to Godard’s contemporaries, including petty feuds and clashing reputations, are calibrated so that cinephilic savants can pat themselves on the back for getting the reference. There’s a world in which these two sensibilities successfully blend together, but co-writers Holly Gent and Vincent Palmo fail to meld this “making of” story with a poignant assessment of how the French New Wave movement indelibly altered the conventions of cinema forever.

In Linklater’s defense, he’s always known how to navigate a party scene. The film starts strong enough by introducing us to the nasally, snobbish Godard (newcomer and standout Guillaume Marbeck) and his talented (and, apparently, far more socially tolerable) colleagues, among them Claude Chabrol (Antoine Besson), Suzanne Schiffman (Jodie Ruth-Forest) and François Truffaut (Adrien Rouyard). Godard broods over the fact that the latter’s film The 400 Blows is a Cannes-bound masterpiece while he struggles to make the transition from critic to cineaste. It’s here, over countless glasses of wine accompanied by stout cigarettes, that we witness the seed germinating in the soon-to-be director’s mind. He steals some money from his publication, the famed Cahiers du Cinéma, fueled by resentment that he is virtually the last on staff to have delved into feature filmmaking. He resolves to use the cash to crash Cannes, where he convinces Georges de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfürst) to sign onto his first feature despite the producer’s dire financial straits.

The rest of the film chronicles the helming of Breathless day by day, an ironic approach considering that one of Godard’s most famous quotes is “a story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.” The excruciating attention to detail here perhaps feels incongruous because Godard’s film is itself a radical usurping of then-conventional cinematic standards. He normalized the “amateurish” use of jump cuts; opted for a cumbersome hand-held camera that emitted so much noise that all dialogue needed to be dubbed; and even hand-spliced film conventionally used for 35mm still cameras in order to shoot in guerilla-style low-light conditions. None of this innovative edginess is present in Nouvelle Vague, which only replicates the aesthetic of this anarchic approach rather than transmitting a comparable air of experimentation in its own right.