The Joyful Mythology of “Nouvelle Vague”

“Nouvelle Vague,” Richard Linklater’s dramatization of the making, in 1959, of Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless,” is a nitpicker’s delight: any viewer who knows anything about Godard’s story can find contrivances, departures from the historical record. I won’t bother; if I want the details, I’ll read a book. What matters is the way that Linklater transforms a lovingly fictionalized vision of Godard into a stealth form of documentary. The reality that it documents isn’t specific to the making of “Breathless”; it involves the title itself, the French New Wave. “Nouvelle Vague” (which streams on Netflix starting this Friday) roots Godard in the milieu, and the movement, with which his name and his films are identified. The movie both shows the fashioning of the New Wave as a modern myth and confirms the enduring power of that myth. Linklater’s essential subject is the undiminished centrality of the New Wave—the idea of it maybe even more than the movies themselves—to current filmmaking.

When I wrote about the film at the time of its theatrical release, I emphasized its personal side—the prime importance of the New Wave, and of Godard, to Linklater himself. But much of the pleasure of “Nouvelle Vague” lies in its relation to the history in question. I’ve long felt that the kind of review the movie invited was something like footnotes, which could reveal the shrewdly crafted historical undergirding that sustains both the movie’s drama and Linklater’s interpretive fire. For starters, the title phrase, coined by a journalist in 1957, initially referred to the postwar generation that was having an impact on French society. Only the following year was it applied to a handful of young filmmakers—in sarcastic scare quotes, implying that their careers might be new but their art wasn’t. But guess what: those filmmakers weren’t the ones who subsequently rose to fame under the French New Wave banner—the quintet of Godard, François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol, and Éric Rohmer—and who are at the center of Linklater’s film. What’s more, even before they made their first features, this group’s revolutionary power had already asserted itself in another part of France’s cinemascape; namely, criticism.

From the start of “Nouvelle Vague,” Linklater depicts the fivesome as critics, even showing Godard (played by Guillaume Marbeck) at a desk in the office of Cahiers du Cinéma, the magazine where he’d been writing since 1952, less than a year after its founding. The influence of Godard’s critical work on his filmmaking is made apparent throughout the shoot of “Breathless” by the way he sprinkles his instructions to cast and crew with references to films that he has in mind—such as Ingmar Bergman’s “Summer with Monika,” Samuel Fuller’s “Forty Guns,” and several ones starring Humphrey Bogart (“High Sierra,” “The Big Sleep,” and “The Maltese Falcon”). Yet “Nouvelle Vague” glosses over what made the critics of Cahiers notorious in the French film industry and influential with young intellectuals: their repudiation of much of the local industry’s mainstream work; their embrace of a wide range of movies from around the world (including Hollywood); and their commitment to the idea of the “auteur.”

That word, instantly identified with the French New Wave, is missing from “Nouvelle Vague,” an absence that comes off not as an accident but as a declaration by Linklater that’s far louder for being silent than a simple mention would have been. Auteur is the ordinary French word for “author,” and the Cahiers quintet used it to characterize the directors whose work they loved because what they particularly loved was the personalization and individuation of an art that’s intrinsically collaborative, almost always expensive, and generally dependent on tight supervision from producers. In other words, there’s something counterintuitive about the idea, and the Cahiers group, in exalting directors as artists of the first order, was at the same time describing their own experience as moviegoers, delivering a lesson in how to watch movies, and clearing a path for the appreciation of the movies that they themselves would eventually make.

It’s an idea that obsesses me, too, because it corresponds with my own experience of watching movies, from when I first started truly caring about them (thanks to “Breathless”) to the present day. But there’s a side to the notion of the director as author that, owing to its aesthetic power, gets all too readily overlooked: its relationship with the production of movies. The most famous critic of the cohort was Truffaut, because his passionate, intemperate, keenly argued work at Cahiers got him hired by a wide-circulation weekly, Arts, where his pace and quantity of writing allowed him to disseminate his auteurist perspective in depth and in detail. There, with startling candor and a sense of destiny, he emphasized that being an auteur involved having as personal and practical an approach to the making of movies—to the money side, to the fundamentals of administration—as to the art of cinema. And it is this aspect that Linklater emphasizes in “Nouvelle Vague.”

Instead of having Godard and his cohorts declaim their beliefs about personal artistry, “Nouvelle Vague” shows the stern stuff that auteurhood is made of, detailing how Godard worked—how strangely, how originally, how daringly, and, to some, how off-puttingly. Linklater records how the producer Georges de Beauregard (played by Bruno Dreyfürst) found Godard’s methods so frustrating that he threatened to pull the plug on the project and cut his losses, and how the movie’s female lead, Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch), had to be talked out of quitting midway through.

Of course, “Breathless” did indeed get filmed and completed—but Linklater shows barely a moment of the finished film. In this way, he embraces the entire potential audience: viewers who’ve seen “Breathless” know, or should know, what’s revolutionary about it, and, for people who haven’t seen “Breathless,” there’s likely a special pleasure in trying to imagine, on the basis of “Nouvelle Vague,” what Godard’s film would be like. When I first saw “Breathless,” as a seventeen-year-old, I didn’t have the foggiest idea of how it or any other movie was made, but I did know that it felt different from any other movie that I’d ever seen because of its jazzlike spontaneity; intuitively, I knew it to be improvisational in ways that other movies felt composed. Moreover, nothing in the first features of the other four members of the Cahiers quintet, great though these films are, suggests that their methods of production were as unusual, as original, as controversial, or as disconcerting as were Godard’s in “Breathless.”

What made the French New Wave a world-historical phenomenon was the work that came out of it; but what made it especially influential with young filmmakers was something more than the movies themselves, something even more than the youth of its vanguard. The New Wave offered future filmmakers a formula for becoming filmmakers—it showed them that one could learn to make films not by mastering technique in film school but simply by watching movies copiously and carefully. It suggested something like a definitive revenge of the nerds, a brass ring within the grasp of fanatical moviegoers, and Godard—whose films feature more, and more brazenly explicit, references to other movies than those of his peers—offered the leading example. “Nouvelle Vague” is a joyful work, because, despite the complications of the making of “Breathless” and the professional troubles (in the face of commercial flops and critical backlash) that the New Wave endured in the years that followed, Linklater inscribes the long arc of the group’s historical triumph into the movie.

What’s easy to forget about this autodidactic vision—and something that Linklater repeatedly underscores—is that the story of the New Wave proves that one has to have friends. One of the delights of “Nouvelle Vague” is how it presents those friends, both famous ones and those who remained out of the limelight, such as Suzanne Schiffman (played by Jodie Ruth-Forest). She’d been a friend since the group’s early times of fanatical moviegoing, in the late nineteen-forties; worked as a script supervisor with Godard and Truffaut through the nineteen-sixties; and became a close collaborator of Truffaut’s—and an Oscar nominee, with him, for the script for “Day for Night”—before working as a director herself.

That’s why the most important thing in “Nouvelle Vague” is what isn’t in it: Godard’s private life. The movie never shows Godard at home, and, with only a few tiny exceptions, it doesn’t show him alone; he’s always in the company of others, only at work or with friends, in public or professional settings. “Nouvelle Vague” isn’t a bio-pic; it’s a view of Godard not as he was to himself but as he was seen, and as he put himself on view. One of the notable threads in “Nouvelle Vague” involves a bold publicity campaign: Godard enthusiastically accepts a suggestion from the publicist Richard Balducci (Pierre-François Garel) to embed a journalist, Marc Pierret (Blaise Pettebone), with the crew in order to publish an account of the shoot. Then Balducci goes further: since “Breathless” is the story of a thief who commits a murder during a getaway and tries to stay a step ahead of the police, the publicist plants, with Godard’s enthusiastic consent, a story exaggerating Godard’s own youthful larcenies.

Linklater is essentially a comedic director with a sense of the perpetual ironies undermining the best of intentions and the best-laid scams alike. A particular delight of “Nouvelle Vague” is that, without facetiousness or mockery, he catches the lighthearted side of the serious business of filmmaking, and does so by emphasizing Godard’s own style of humor, one that blended sardonic provocation and playful innocence. Linklater foregrounds Godard’s antics—his whimsical posing for the set photographer Raymond Cauchetier (Frank Cicurel), his handstands in a café, his stroll on a bench in a Métro station. For Godard, humor is performative, not just a way of getting a laugh but of getting a rise—or of setting the clock back and imposing a boyish gaiety on the stern responsibilities of adults.

From the start, Godard had a sense of publicity, and his tart puckishness was an integral part of it. He cultivated a public image by way of interviews of enduring aphoristic power, and in public appearances that he dominated with his actorly presence (including an actor’s shrewd sense of upstaging and drama) and with a master advertiser’s sense of fabricated spectacle—even as he made films of such first-person immediacy and confessional daring that he became personally identified with his films. The combination of his work and his press gave him the lead role in a mythology of his own making; he counted on his public persona to help his career survive commercial failures. Creating a fervor of personal devotion may have helped at the box office, and it also created the illusion that knowing Godard’s films meant knowing him, fostering the sense that he belonged, with a jealous exclusivity, to each viewer who loved his work.

The story of “Nouvelle Vague” is, in large measure, the story of that mythology—how it was formed, how it was cultivated, and how it found its way into the history of cinema and into Linklater’s own cinematic vision. It’s one of Linklater’s signal achievements that his view of Godard is both personal and sufficiently impersonal—a group portrait from the start. By not impinging on the private Godard, not offering an intimate and comprehensive image of him, Linklater does something equally important: the movie’s sense of respectful distance is crucial both to Linklater’s concept and to his movie’s aptly enthusiastic reception. ♦

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Richard Brody, a film critic, began writing for The New Yorker in 1999. He is the author of “Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard.”

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