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Nouvelle Vague Makes a Case for the Ambition of Youth
Richard Linklater’s new movie, about the making of Breathless, isn’t about nostalgia — it’s about how being brash can yield great art.
Aside from being shot in inviting black-and-white, Nouvelle Vague doesn’t attempt to mimic the choices — like the jump cuts, the documentary-esque camerawork, the heavy use of improvisation — that made Jean-Luc Godard’s directorial debut about an Bogart-idolizing criminal (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and an American journalism student (Jean Seberg) so radical when it hit theaters in 1960. We have the reassurance that a masterpiece will come out of this process, despite Jean-Luc repeatedly sending everyone home after a few hours of shooting because he’s “out of ideas.” But everyone else — even Jean-Paul, who jokes that his agent keeps telling him he’ll never work again because of this — can take comfort in the idea that the stakes are relatively low, and the time commitment is minor. What’s funny is that Linklater’s own efforts to push at the boundaries of the form have involved meticulous longitudinal projects like Boyhood and his ongoing version of Merrily We Roll Along that are shot over years, making use of the way its participants age and change.
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