by Mark Demetrius
Worth: $15.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Guillaume Marbeck, Zoey Deutsch, Aubry Dublin
Intro:
How much you enjoy it may depend to some extent on what you thought of Breathless (if you’ve seen it), and whether you agree with the auteur theory …
Set predominantly in Paris in 1959, this is the dramatised tale of the making of Breathless, Jean-Luc Godard’s hugely venerated and influential directorial debut. It’s meticulously well made, in gorgeous black and white, but unavoidably linear and at times prosaic in structure. We watch the lead-up to the shoot and follow its progress on a day-to-day basis, right through to the editing stage. The result is far more entertaining than that may sound, though mostly less than riveting.
Godard (Guillaume Marbeck) was of course one of the leading lights of the titular French ‘’Nouvelle Vague’’ — New Wave — along with Francois Truffaut (who wrote the story for Breathless), Claude Chabrol, Agnes Varda and others. Many of these people are portrayed here, some by uncanny lookalikes.
If Nouvelle Vague is to believed, which it probably is, Godard was not the easiest person to work with, as well as being an exasperatingly inexhaustible source of homilies and quotes, especially pretentiously UNpretentious ones like “All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun’’. The other main characters are the stars of Breathless, Jean Seberg (an impressive and charismatic Zoey Deutch) and Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dublin).
The bottom line here is that Jean-Luc Godard and his peers made a lot of innovative — and just plain great — films, particularly in the Sixties. So, it’s quite interesting to learn something about the mechanics behind Godard’s style and aesthetic. In any case, Nouvelle Vague gets a bit more diverting as we get to know the major players. How much you enjoy it may depend to some extent on what you thought of Breathless (if you’ve seen it), and whether you agree with the auteur theory — the one that says the director is the creative force behind a movie. But this remains a clever homage.
