You can see why Richard Linklater feels a kinship with Jean-Luc Godard. Both emerged from a particular filmmaking scene, Austin of the early 1990s vs. the Cahiers du Cinema critics-turned-directors of the French New Wave. Both had the goal of revolutionising the form and function of cinema. Both are given to philosophical pronouncements about life, especially among characters who aren’t traditional movie heroes. While Godard made some of the most challenging and critically acclaimed films of the 1960s and onward, Linklater has dabbled in revolutionary techniques ranging from rotoscoping to filming a single movie over the course of 12 years.

It’s doubtful, though, that Linklater ever presided over a shoot as chaotic and undisciplined as Godard’s first feature film, Breathless, shot in 1959 and released in 1960. That’s because maybe no one has ever presided over a shoot that chaotic and undisciplined. Godard had 20 days to shoot but barely a script, which was not such a problem because the loud camera he insisted on using made synchronised dialogue impossible. Some days, he decided to cancel shooting while he played pinball, claiming he was sick, or wrapped the day’s work after only two hours. This is not because Godard didn’t have a particular vision that he sought to execute in a particular way – in his mind, he could justify each of these circumlocutions as part of the artistic process. However, it might be because of a certain fear of failure that his apparent nonchalance could never fully hide.

This shoot is the subject of Linklater’s new, or perhaps nouvelle, film, Nouvelle Vague. Even non-speakers will probably know this translates to “New Wave,” and watching Nouvelle Vague might help them better develop that French. French is the film’s default spoken language, performed by French actors – other than a few stray English lines from Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch), the star of Breathless, whose own French is quite good, if labouring under the strangled pronunciation of an American. (The character, not the actress playing her.) And yes, Linklater lovingly creates this film’s time and place, including his use of the original black and white of Breathless, in the ultimate homage to one of his cinematic heroes.

We’re introduced to Godard (Guillaume Marbeck) the same as we’re introduced to everyone else: with one of the film’s few moments of intentional artifice, where characters look at the camera and their name appears on screen underneath. We might be introduced to Godard, though it’s hard to say we can really know him, hidden as he always is behind sunglasses. We can certainly sense his frustration, as the film opens with him failing to contain his envy over fellow critic-cum-director Francois Truffaut (Adrien Rouyard), whose The 400 Blows is the toast of Cannes. As Godard has seen his fellow Cahiers writers steadily make their debut features, and perhaps several beyond that, Godard has only filmed a short – which to him is worse than making nothing at all. (Tell that to the later Godard, who would go on to make approximately 972 shorts.)

With an outline of a story by Truffaut, Godard does secure enough financing from wary producer Georges de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfurst) for a film inspired by a French petty criminal and his American girlfriend. As a sense of how the industry is now showing faith in unproven talents with flimsily constructed material, this idea is enough to snare French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin) and American movie star Jean Seberg (the aforementioned Zoey Deutch). None of them is expecting a shoot where Godard has not yet written half the material, and may never write it at all, and the whole rickety enterprise is on the verge of collapsing at any moment, with Beauregard losing sleep at the same pace he fears he’s losing money.

The margins of Nouvelle Vague are filled in with all sorts of other French cinematic luminaries making cameos, such as Jacques Rivette, Jean Cocteau, Eric Rohmer, Robert Bresson, Jean-Pierre Melville and Agnes Varda – so many, in fact, that it isn’t worth listing the names of the actors playing them, French actors unfamiliar to most of us anyway. Whether Godard actually collided with all these people during the time immediately before or during the filming of Breathless is kind of irrelevant, since their involvement is all plausible and enriches the proceedings immeasurably.

Nouvelle Vague may not be a substantial film. It’s not trying to make a grand statement about anything in particular. But it sure is a delightful one, continuing to expand our notions of what Linklater is capable in ways that hit all our pleasure centres. If you’re going to recreate a period from the past with painstaking detail, but perhaps not without a strong and coherent central theme, you should do it with the sense of fun and – let’s use the French term – joie de vivre that Linklater and his cast give us here.

Because the outcome is known, that Breathless came to be considered one of the most influential films of all time and began a career of more than 50 features for Godard, it’s easier to watch Nouvelle Vague without an anxiety-producing fatalism about this project. We know Godard will get there in the end, but we can’t help wonder how that happened while watching what unfolds. Breathless was a film famously saved in the editing, becoming a hypnotic sequence of snippets of sometimes only half-filmed scenes, in a way that was groundbreaking. We don’t see the editing part of it, so we don’t know how editor Cecile Decugis actually pulled that off.

As we watch characters like Seberg and Belmondo overcome their doubts and start to have fun with the material – she had more doubts than he did – we understand that this madness was leading somewhere real in terms of imagining cinema to be something different from what it had always been. And maybe Nouvelle Vague needs no more theme than that. It captures a moment of change in the history of a medium that Linklater himself has changed several times over – a medium beloved not only by Linklater, but by those of us watching his and Godard’s films.

 

Nouvelle Vague opens in Australian cinemas tomorrow.