Nouvelle Vague on Canal Plus: a delightful exercise in style (review)

Richard Linklater recounts the filming of A Bout de Souffle in a lively and joyful comedy, barely weighed down by its heritage and tourist dimension.

Presented in competition last year at the Cannes Film Festival, and awarded four Césars a few months ago (including best director for Richard Linklater), Nouvelle Vague is broadcast for the first time on Canal Plus this Tuesday evening. The film can also be viewed in streaming on MyCanal. Our review:

The Texan Richard Linklater comes to Paris to reconstruct the making of A Bout de Souffle, the inaugural Godard which made the New Wave a tidal wave, at the beginning of 1960. The director of Boyhood, king of the coming-of-age movie, envisages this French mythology as the pretext for a new film of learning, of youth, of first times. This is Generation Rebel relocated to the Latin Quarter.

His talent for recreating small bubbles of space-time in which it is good to live works to the fullest here, and is coupled with an extraordinary exercise in style “in the manner of”, a superbly crafted pastiche, carried by irresistible actors, which gives this New wave airs of a real-fake Godard film – that of the sixties, crude and fanciful.

Linklater undoubtedly aims to encourage today’s young filmmakers to rediscover the carelessness and desire to deconstruct everything that agitated Godard and Co at the time. A gesture in slight contradiction with the company’s heritage approach, its respectful bows which are also those of an American tourist in Paris, of a fan who has clearly chosen to “print the legend”.

We thus never have access to the interiority of Godard, constantly hidden behind his dark glasses and his aphorisms, and who until the end remains this silhouette taken from a clear-cut comic strip. But this is not the intention of the film, which is intended to be educational but cool, a course in the history of cinema for laughs and in fast motion, like the visit to the Louvre in Bande à part.

By Richard Linklater With Guillaume Marbeck, Zoey Deutch, Aubry Dullin… Duration 1h45.