Richard Linklater’s Lovely Glimpse of Godard

The official synopsis for Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague describes it as “the story of Godard making Breathless, told in the style and spirit in which Godard made Breathless.”

It’s a catchy pitch but also a bit deceiving. Godard’s 1960 film broke all sorts of narrative and stylistic conventions, writing its own rules about what a movie could do and paving the way for modern cinema as we know it. Linklater’s charming and well-researched homage is much more traditional: Told in a linear fashion, shot with a sizeable crew, featuring actors who look and act like the famous people they’re playing, relying on tons of VFX shots to recreate Paris at the time, it’s a far cry from the style of Godard. And yet it does an impressive job capturing the spirit of the man at work, highlighting what it took — and often didn’t take — to put his groundbreaking movie together.

No stranger to experimenting himself, Linklater has dabbled in all sorts of genres throughout his career, from his breakthrough 1990 indie Slacker to animated features like A Scanner Darkly or Waking Life; from Hollywood comedies like School of Rock to a project like Boyhood, shot over a decade with the same actors as they gradually aged. The Houston-born director has always toyed with film form — albeit in ways adhering to more classical modes of storytelling — so it’s not entirely a surprise that he was fascinated enough by Godard’s process to make an entire movie about it.

Loaded with factoids concerning Breathless’ pre-production and chaotic 20-day shoot, with cameos by a who’s-who of New Wave members, Nouvelle Vague seems destined for viewers who immediately know what its title means. In other words, it’s a cinephile’s film through and through — a making-of that won’t make much sense to anyone who hasn’t seen the original movie. But it’s also breezy and relatively entertaining, never taking itself too seriously while highlighting an extremely serious moment in film history.

Linklater doesn’t mimic Godard here, though he gives us a good idea of what the director — played by newcomer Guillaume Marbeck, who bears an uncanny resemblance to the man himself — could have been like to work with. In a nutshell, Godard was impossible, refusing to write a real script, calling it a day on set when he ran out of ideas, disrespecting laws of filmic continuity and getting into a fistfight at one point with his exasperated producer, George de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfürst).

Yet he was also witty, wise, quite the charmer, and obsessed with making something that had never been done before. The opening of Nouvelle Vague shows Godard, who was just shy of 30, trailing behind fellow Cahiers du cinéma critics Truffaut (Adrien Rouyard), Claude Chabrol (Antoine Besson), Jacques Rivette (Jonas Marmy) and Eric Rohmer (Côme Thieulin), all of whom had already directed their first feature. “The best way to criticize a film is to make one,” a frustrated Godard quips to someone at a party, using one of the many JLG aphorisms that riddle a well-researched screenplay (written by Holly Gent, Vince Palmo, Michèle Halberstadt and Laetitia Masson).

Riding the crest of the New Wave after the dual successes of Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and Chabrol’s Le Beau Serge, Godard manages to convince de Beauregard to back a low-budget independent feature (made for today’s equivalent of $77,000) based on a news story about a gangster and his girlfriend. The director casts amateur boxer Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin, another uncanny resemblance) to play the male lead and Hollywood starlet Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch, convincing as a fish out of water) to play his American girlfriend. A skeleton crew is assembled for the shoot, including former war cameraman Raoul Coutard (Matthieu Penchinat) and crafty assistant director Pierre Rissient (Benjamin Clery).

The rest of Nouvelle Vague offers a daily account of what happened on the Breathless set, and it may surprise those who’ve never read anything about the movie’s history. Since there was only ever a treatment (co-written with Truffaut), Godard made scenes up as he went along, shooting without sound so the actors could dub themselves in post. He rarely did more than one or two takes and preferred to rush through sequences, improvising and suddenly stopping when he was uninspired. Sometimes, the cast and crew would spend all day hanging around a café in Montparnasse while Godard scribbled ideas on napkins.

The making of Breathless looks like amateur hour, which is what the deadpan Coutard and some of the other crew members seem to think. A highly skeptical Seberg does her best to perform amid all the chaos, while Belmondo just rolls with the punches and has a great time. And yet from day one, Godard seems so certain of what he thinks and wants — “reality is not continuity!”, he snaps at the script girl (Pauline Belle) when she complains about a misplaced prop — that he wins most of his cast and crew over.

It also helps that he’s a disarmingly funny guy capable of both dishing out jokes and taking them. Linklater smartly focuses on the lighter side of a director known for heavy works that sit at the very top of the arthouse pyramid, whereas in reality, Godard was often half-comedian and half-film-philosopher. This doesn’t mean he blows off the importance of making his first feature, and even when he experiences setbacks he keeps his eyes on the prize (“Disappointments are temporary, film is forever,” he says with utter self-assurance). If wannabe directors take anything away from Nouvelle Vague, it’s that Godard had an idea of where he wanted to go but never knew how he would get there. His very openness to possibility is what made his movies so original.

Linklater’s film is less innovative than anything JLG made, but it offers a rare and informed inside look at a pivotal moment not only of the director’s career, but of film history in general. Along with all the New Wave heavyweights, Nouvelle Vague makes room for lesser-known figures like Rissient or Suzanne Schiffman (Jodie Ruth Forest), who went on to co-write scripts with Truffaut and Rivette. And it underlines how the movement didn’t come out of nowhere, but was fathered by a handful of seasoned auteurs — Jean-Pierre Melville (Tom Novembre), Roberto Rosselini (Laurent Mothe) and Robert Bresson (Aurélien Lorgnier) — who influenced Godard and his cohorts.

The research carries over to David Chambille’s impressively authentic black-and-white photography, which makes the action look like it was shot on film stock back in 1959. Sets by Katia Wyszkop recreate Paris interiors of the epoch, including the original Cahiers offices and various cafés all around town. As for the exteriors, 300 shots required extensive VFX to whisk us back to the time period, especially for the famous scenes in Breathless that were lensed on a jam-packed Champs-Elysées.

It’s an impressive package that certainly required more money and manpower than Godard’s first feature did, while ironically enough, the moral of this movie is that a big budget and crew aren’t needed to make something great. Linklater celebrates JLG’s audacity even if he’s directed something more conventional (although much to his credit, he directed it almost entirely in French).

If Nouvelle Vague is not exactly Breathless, it’s a loving homage to the crazy way Breathless was made — back when you could shoot movies fast, cheap and out of control, and somehow change cinema in the process.