On one level, Linklater’s film – about the making of Breathless – is an obvious candy-treat gifted by a nerdish cinephile to nerdish cinephiles. The sort of movie that a movie-history buff like me might feel guilty for liking so much. Watching it, I kept thinking of Orson Welles’s admonition that too many filmmakers were in danger of absorbing too many films and then making films that would be homages more than anything else. I think Welles already had reservations about the young French auteurist-critics-turned-directors: Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol etc. I wonder what he would make of a fanboy-tribute film that is about the early work of those fanboy-tribute-making-directors?
But I still loved Nouvelle Vague for base reasons: it is about a film I know well, about a period and people that I (think I) know well, it is the sort of affectionate homage I personally enjoy; it depicts a (possibly inaccurate) version of behind-the-scenes events, and I have spent a lot of time living in various such landscapes (including imagined versions of what it must have been like when my favourite films were being made).
Also, the humour, and the presentation of Godard – a forbidding figure for many of us who got into “serious” cinema in our teens – as a goofy young man, full of aphorisms about film and life but also a bit hesitant and awkward, and capable of taking a joke directed at him. (As in a scene where Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo direct *him*, and mock him a little too, in his brief appearance as the informer.)Maybe Nouvelle Vague simplifies and postures, but so what? It’s only red, not blood.
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