The very existence of “Nouvelle Vague” is invigorating. In a culture dominated by streaming TV and reboots of action properties and endless children’s movies, who expects a film about the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 “Breathless,” a pivotal title in the French New Wave? Of course Richard Linklater directed it. He’s the only famous American filmmaker with the adventurousness to even consider it. He’s Gen X’s friendly answer to Robert Altman, another restless iconoclast who refused to be pigeonholed.
Unapologetic specificity is the chief draw of “Nouvelle Vague.” It is aimed at cinephiles, no others need apply. It expects you to be amused when names like François Truffaut and Claude Chabrol and Agnès Varda are dropped. Whenever a new luminary of the French New Wave appears, an onscreen title accords them a hero’s entrance. You are expected to be familiar with Cahiers du Cinema, a French film magazine that is intrinsic to the rise and continuation of the French New Wave and for which titans like Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol and many others wrote.
“Nouvelle Vague” pulls you into a realm where movies matter.
Movies aren’t a babysitting device for children here, or something to have on while you eat and surf through filtered photos on your phone. People don’t fetishize Oscars or box office grosses here. Art is the thing, and movies are a barometer of society and even a currency, especially for the rabid and singular obsessives of the Cahiers du Cinema.
For a while, this spirit and the fetishistic aesthetic carry the movie along. It is Paris in 1959, which is rendered by cinematographer David Chambille in black-and-white hues that suggest less the work of the real French New Wave (the photography here is too smooth) than a fan’s dream of it. Godard (Guillaume Marbeck) is 29 years old, a sly egghead watching as Truffaut and Chabrol segue from criticism to filmmaking to great acclaim. Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows” has just hit the Cannes Film Festival and it is a sensation, a call to arms for direct and personal filmmaking.
Godard gets a project set up with the producer Georges de Beauregard (Bruno Freyfürst), who will be a foil of his throughout production. Concessions are made for the sake of commerciality, as “Nouvelle Vague” is refreshingly concerned with how art and business cohabitate. Rather than filming a huge script — part of which will later become another Godard masterwork — the filmmakers decide on a simple crime story loosely concocted by Truffaut himself, who is a name now.
They land a Hollywood actress, Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch), who is fresh from having an awful time working with Otto Preminger, and decide on a friend of Godard’s, Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin), for the male lead. The remainder of “Nouvelle Vague” is driven —with an unusual degree of obsessiveness — by the shooting of what would become “Breathless.”
Linklater and screenwriters Holly Gent and Vince Palmo, Jr. soon reveal their governing interest in this project. Working with the soon to be legendary cinematographer Raoul Coutard (Matthieu Penchinat), Godard shoots the crime movie as if it’s a documentary, capturing details with a small portable camera on the fly. There is virtually no script, as Godard shoots according to his whims. When he’s out of inspiration, he calls a wrap for the day, even if it’s two hours into the day and he’s only got 20 days in total to shoot the entire picture. This cryptic auteur in the making is doing what he promised he would do: redefining the production of cinema.
Like many filmmakers to follow in the wake of the French New Wave, Linklater is intoxicated with Godard’s ability to bend an art form to suit his will, obliterating the distance between art and artist and audience.
The free-associative films that would cement Godard’s legend in the 1960s — “Le Petit Soldat” and “Made in U.S.A.” and “Weekend” among them — blended essay and collage and auto-fiction and genre tropes with dizzying speed and inventiveness. To interpret them, as many people have spent decades doing, almost seems beside the point. Their sense of freedom, their anarchic beauty, is the point. And this freedom can be wonderfully contagious.
Something that can stand in the way of insecure aspiring artists is a notion of “the rules.” Prospective filmmakers may have personal feelings that they wish to express, yet the notion of building a three-act structure around them may sound intimidating, cumbersome, boring, even at odds with the feelings themselves. Godard here is a portrait of an artist devising a way to skip to the good stuff, the lively personal textures and fleeting observations that drive an artist to want to create. And when he can’t come up with them, he goes home. This is filmmaking as jazz solo, as an ecosphere of vibes.
The spirit of this mode of production can be felt in the real “Breathless.” It’s an astonishingly loose and lively movie, but a fixation with ‘the rules’ remains. It’s there in the obsession that the Belmondo character has with Humphrey Bogart, who represents the bad ass of Hollywood crime movies. “Breathless” is about breaking the bounds of convention while being haunted by the possibility that convention is better. It blends real life with cinema, making the two indistinguishable, and in turn reflecting Godard’s confidence as well as his vulnerability.
That “Breathless” subtext is catnip for cinephile eggheads, while everyone else can groove to the fatalism, the rebellion, the sexiness, the chic sentimentality masquerading as cynicism. “Breathless” gave artists permission to be different, an idea that has defined Linklater’s career, starting with his own emboldening “Slacker.”
If it seems like I’m writing around “Nouvelle Vague,” it’s because the movie amounts to little on its own, in the moment. Linklater defers freely to the mythology of Godard as an intellectual who speaks only in aphorisms that sound profound at first glance but make little actual sense, though obviously no one is going to call out Jean-Luc Godard.
Marbeck captures a particular brand of blithe impudence that in my eyes always linked Godard in vibe metrics with John Lennon. But Godard is less a character here than an idea, a statement of principles with which Linklater sympathizes. The only real character is Seberg, played with vivid tartness by Deutch. The film’s karaoke quality is intensified by the distracting lack of sociopolitical texture. It’s notable not to hear once of the Algerian War, for instance, given how it loomed over Godard’s most famous work, or of the “tradition of quality” against which the French New Wave was rebelling.
“Blue Moon,” the other experimental biopic directed by Richard Linklater and released this autumn, manages a more nimble balance of art and legend and narrative and declaration of personal working ethos than “Nouvelle Vague” does. It feels like a living and breathing movie in the moment, perhaps because it’s about failure. “Nouvelle Vague” amounts to little more than an amusing nod of respect to a master, which is to say that it’s safe. Jean-Luc Godard didn’t do safe. Linklater celebrates the expanding of an art form’s boundaries by coloring within its lines.
A few years ago, taken with his lurid and unexpectedly tender “Candy Land,” I wrote here that writer-director John Swab was someone to watch. He is a prolific filmmaker in the realm of VOD thrillers, though he seems to be on the verge of expansion, as he is set to direct a Will Smith movie. I hate to lose him to the ultra-budget sphere, but it’s not hard to see what producers see, especially in Swab’s new “King Ivory,” an epic drug thriller that blends macho pulp with earnest civic minded drama.
That blend has an almost inherent tension: Does Swab care about the ramifications of violence or is he getting off on the thrills? If you’re okay with the answer being “both,” and respect that Swab is wrestling with the conflict between sensationalism and its real-world reverberations, you may find “King Ivory” to be a pleasant surprise.
“King Ivory” is pitched as the “Traffic” of the fentanyl epidemic. As in that 2000 Steven Soderbergh movie, there are many narrative strands here that offer a genre-movie outline of how drugs are being shipped, dealt, and consumed, in this case in crime-ravaged Tulsa, Oklahoma. Swab is from Tulsa and has said that he is recovering from a fentanyl addiction himself, and this experience bleeds into the production. There are many scenes of people smoking up, and they have an extraordinary sense of intimacy. So do the film’s visceral and jolting action sequences.
The cast is vast, eccentric, and uniformly impressive. James Badge Dale and George Carroll are macho narcotics officers who are more tender than appearances suggest. Ben Foster is a recently released con negotiating a touchy situation between Native, Black, and Mexican gangs, and his tracheostomy tube, reducing his voice to a whisper, only makes him seem more dangerous. Michael Mando is a dealer and coyote. Ritchie Coster is a livewire who straddles a line between dealer and addict, while Graham Greene is, unforgettably, a gang leader who controls most of the Tulsa fentanyl racket.
If you’re looking for something sharp and nasty to cut through the holiday bloat, you could do much worse than “King Ivory.” “Nouvelle Vague,” predestined to have a better reputation, could use a touch of its volatility.
“Nouvelle Vague” is now streaming on Netflix. “King Ivory” is in theaters.
