Nouvelle Vague
Grade: A (***** out of *****)
In Novelle Vague, Richard Linklater, one of the most versatile and prolific indie filmmakers, has recreated meticulously and passionately a crucial moment (a time capsule) in film history, the creation of Jean-Luc Godarda’s seminal, Breathkess.
It is a particular time and place, Paris circa 1959-1960, witnessing the birth of whole new movmenet: the French New Wave (La Nouvelle Vague).
Linklater is working like a committed (borderline obsessed) director, making an enchanting movie, full of magic tricks, homages, and references, in the most positive and playful senses of these terms.
He is recreating crucial decision and scenes–literally so, but with sly humor and some detavhed irony–immersing viewers in sort of what was it like to be on the set of this semi-improvised, semi-planned picture, which was made on the spot as the crew and cast went along, day after day.
We get to observe his bursts of creativity, both spontanous and panned, rational decisions and also irrational anger, all expressions of a director who is already self-absorbed and temperamental in his very first w0rk., as if determined to show the wirld that he is a new kind of filmmaker (which he went in t become for the next six decades).
As Godard, Guillaume Marbeck, acting from behind sunglasses he never removes, nails the visionary New Wave director’s poker-faced mystery to nearly improbable perfection.
