The Joyful Mythology of “Nouvelle Vague”

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.