Nouvelle Vague: Insolent Like No One Else

Marbeck necessarily dominates Nouvelle Vague, at least until the shoot begins, playing up the duplicitous rogue, a character perhaps not too dissimilar to the casual criminal at the center of Breathless, but one bursting with rule-breaking ideas about filmmaking that he needs to try out, being the last of the New Wave critics—after Chabrol, Truffaut, Eric Rohmer (Côme Thieulin), and Jacques Rivette (Jonas Marmy)—to make a feature. We soon come to admire his audacity and cheek. He is fortunate to have the immediate, instinctive backing of his friend Belmondo (Aubry Dullin), with whom he had made the short film Charlotte et son Jules.

When Godard first shows a picture of Seberg to Beauregard, and Beau-Beau (his nickname) says, “We’ll never get her,” it’s the first indication that Otto Preminger is an invisible influence on Godard and his film. Preminger, who directed several noirs in the forties, discovered Seberg in Marshalltown, Iowa, via a talent search for a teenager to play Joan of Arc in Saint Joan (1957). He followed that bet on an unknown ingenue by immediately casting her again as the lead in Bonjour Tristesse (1958). In the first of many moments in Nouvelle Vague where Godard is cajoling Seberg into her role, he tells her that Patricia Franchini is a continuance of the teenager she played in the latter film. Deutch portrays Seberg as a sophisticated survivor of bullying, someone who has learned to roll with the metaphorical punches and give as good back. She tells Godard that Preminger was a sadist. When Godard denies her the surety of a script, she continues to dangle the possibility of pulling out of the film. Their fragile to-ing and fro-ing remains a key tension throughout the daily process of shooting.

But Nouvelle Vague is not just a portrait of Godard and Seberg’s struggles to collaborate; it’s also a snapshot of the culture of New Wave critics turned directors. If Preminger is a visually absent influence, Italian neorealist director Roberto Rossellini (Laurent Mothe) is a present one. Rossellini comes to give a speech to the Cahiers crowd not long before Godard begins his shoot, telling them to seek the truth, that the camera is “a ballpoint pen, an imbecile.” He elaborates further to Godard, who gives him a lift to his hotel, extolling many of the ideas—“shoot quickly; interrupt shooting when inspiration flags”—that Godard will employ and that drive Beau-Beau to distraction. Just before Godard’s first day of filming, after a screening of Frank Tashlin’s Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, Truffaut bombards him with playful, impossible advice: “Think of Rossellini. Be fast like him. Be witty like Sacha Guitry, musical like Orson Welles, simple like Marcel Pagnol. Be wounded like Nicholas Ray, effective like Hitchcock, profound like Bergman, and insolent like no one else.” Chabrol and Rohmer join in, and then Schiffman delivers the punch line: “Just don’t fuck it up.” It’s a wonderfully alarming snapshot of the pressures on a first-time director of such ambition.

As the shoot kicks off, and Godard keeps everyone on the back foot, the filmmaking advice, literary quotations, and philosophical musings pile up (much as they continue to do in Godard’s later films). This is how the more general cultural idea of Paris in the late fifties makes its presence felt. Godard does all his writing in cafés, just as the existentialist-philosopher pair Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre famously did, and conducts his script meetings with Truffaut in the Richelieu-Drouot subway station. At Godard’s bidding, first assistant director Pierre Rissient (Benjamin Clery) quotes Sartre as a way of launching the production, and later, Godard supplies Seberg with a line that might have been lifted out of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness: “Am I unhappy because I am not free, or not free because I am unhappy?”

Paradoxes abound, but the one at the heart of Nouvelle Vague is that, in celebrating and eulogizing Godard’s off-the-cuff, improvisatory approach, Linklater himself mostly did the opposite. As he explained in a Lincoln Center interview, he and his young cast and crew did much careful preparation and rehearsal before they began the shoot. And it is easy to surmise that the very reason the film is so charmingly convincing, and so plausible a re-creation of a film being made up as it goes along, is precisely because of that thorough prep. The script relishes gossip and film lore and is full of succinct humor. There’s a lot of goofing off and mutual teasing on set. Much of the fun revolves around the technology that Godard put to use, in particular the postman’s cart adapted to hide cinematographer Raoul Coutard (Matthieu Penchinat) for the famous street scene where Patricia is selling the New York Herald Tribune, and the fact that they’re using the actual Éclair Cameflex CM3 camera that the real Coutard wielded, which was so noisy that all the dialogue in Breathless had to be dubbed in afterward. Linklater’s own stricture on his cinematographer, David Chambille, was that they should only employ shots that were possible in 1959, in monochrome and at the same 1.37:1 aspect ratio as Breathless. This, too, makes the period re-creation feel all the more accessible, following, as it does, Rossellini’s dictum that the best way of filming is the simplest. Black and white also made it easier for Linklater to incorporate period shots of Paris and Cannes to help achieve verisimilitude.

Chambille’s work here is a treat, comparable to other great monochrome period-reconstruction dramas, not least Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull (1980), the film that Linklater has said put him on the road to filmmaking. Gorgeous black-and-white images combined with a jazz soundtrack act like a mnemonic to allow the late-fifties/early-sixties period to manifest itself and say, “This was a cool time to be young.” Seberg’s nocturnal, clothed dip in a public fountain is like a more modest variation on Anita Ekberg’s Trevi Fountain display in Federico Fellini’s La dolce vita (1960). In their growing amiable flirtation, dancing in sync to the Olympics’ “(Baby) Hully Gully,” Seberg/Deutch and Belmondo/Dullin anticipate the famous Madison dance scene that will be in Godard’s Band of Outsiders (1964). In a couple of scenes, there is just the slightest hint that Seberg’s marriage to wannabe filmmaker François Moreuil (Paolo Luka-Noé), whose arrival at the end of each day is like a proverbial wet blanket, will not endure (Seberg would file for divorce in 1960).

“Good thing the camera really loves these two,” says Coutard of Seberg and Belmondo toward the end of filming Breathless, knowing, as he must have, how precarious what he’d shot might seem, and not able to anticipate how effective Godard’s famous use of the jump cut would be. But since postproduction falls mostly outside the parameters of Nouvelle Vague, we must leave speculations about the editing room behind.

Godard later said of Breathless, in relation to Preminger’s noir Fallen Angel (1945), that “the characters played by Belmondo and Dana Andrews are somewhat alike. They’re people who . . . must have represented for me at the time a certain ideal of freedom, meaning doing whatever you want.” Linklater portrays Godard exactly like this, as someone striving to do things his way against all odds, yet with the distinction of having allies in the fellowship of cinephiles. The fact that Linklater has pulled off so many hugely ambitious films himself—the twelve-year production of Boyhood (2014), for instance, or the eighteen-year span of The Before Trilogy, from Before Sunrise (1995) to Before Midnight (2013), with Sunset in between—makes his keen sympathy with Godard’s plight all the more convincing. With Nouvelle Vague, the “making of” film becomes a rich feature event all its own (as it did for Godard in 1963’s Contempt and 1982’s Passion), and it’s terrific to see so much venerated cinephile history handled with such grace and wit by a director who has found a whole new tribe of French actors whom the camera also loves.