Nouvelle Vague image Courtesy of Netflix
(Courtesy of Netflix)
Could there be anything more meta than a film about a director, screened at the Directors Guild of America theater, with a Q&A moderated by a director, featuring the film’s director and a star playing the director who himself failed as a director? No.
That, however, was exactly the situation at Thursday’s gala screening of Nouvelle Vague, director Richard Linklater’s loving black-&-white tale about the unlikely, shambolic process Jean-Luc Godard used to create his hugely influential first feature, the gangster/beatnik neo-noir Breathless (A Bout De Shuffle in the original French), starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg.
The screening at the DGA’s unsurprisingly superb main theater in the heart of Hollywood was part of The American French Film Festival, which wraps today after showcasing an array of French films and TV shows over the past week.
After the Nouvelle Vague screening, Linklater was joined onstage by his film’s stars Zoey Deutch (Seberg), Aubry Dullin (Belmondo) and Guillaume Marbeck (Godard), as well as the film’s French producer, Michele Pétin. Long-time U.S. director Taylor Hackford (An Officer and a Gentleman, Against All Odds, Ray) was an enthusiastic moderator as a former president of the sponsoring Franco-American Cultural Fund.
So, about as meta as it could get. And by meta, we mean a thing about the same thing, not that little Internet company formerly focused on the metaverse. The company involved here, actually, is Netflix, which bought U.S. rights to the film when it debuted in June at, of course, the Cannes Film Festival (other distributors bought rights throughout the rest of the world, helping save the finances of a film basically shot on spec).
This past weekend, Nouvelle Vague started a short run in theaters that will qualify it for Oscar consideration. Deutch in particular should get Academy attention for her sparkling, delightful inhabitation of a skeptical Seberg, down to that Iowa accent on her French. But also helping prospects: Linklater is a five-time Oscar nominee (three for Boyhood) and the Motion Picture Academy tends to love good motion pictures about motion pictures, even if they’re in French (The Artist, for instance, won Best Picture and four other Oscars among 10 nominations in 2012).
Nouvelle Vague is one of “10 to 12” Netflix films that will get some kind of awards-season run, a Netflix awards spokeswoman told me at the afterparty. Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, due out later this month, is one obvious contender from the streaming giant, which temporarily waives its usual streaming-first policy, giving contenders a short theatrical run to qualify them for Oscars and other awards.
Perhaps less obvious as an Oscar contender (it may not qualify given its streaming debut), but also perhaps far more certain as a popular awards candidate is Golden, the ear-worm among ear-worms in Netflix’s most-watched feature ever, K-Pop Demon Hunters. If voters take into account that film’s rabid millions of fans, who this week made Golden No. 1 on Sirius XM and Pandora’s Pop Hits playlist (after weeks atop Billboard’s charts), it could pick up awards in multiple competitions this season.
Linklater told me after the panel that he wanted the film to look not so much like it was about an era but actually of that era, by another director among the tsunami of prodigious new talent that washed over French cinema over just a few years.
In this case, Linklater said he thinks of the film like it had been made by Jacques Rozier, a Godard collaborator who was much loved by the Cahiers du Cinema brigades who forged a lengthy if less prominent career as a film and TV director. Cannes screened three of Rozier’s films over his long lifetime, which ended two years ago as the last surviving New Wave director. Perhaps Nouvelle Vague makes three and a half films at Cannes for Rozier.
On stage for the Q&A, Marbeck was sans Godard’s trademark Ray-Ban Wayfarer sunglasses (In the film, Godard wears them always, even in a movie theater and nightclubs).
But Marbeck’s resemblance to the original Godard is striking, So too were Dullin’s Belmondo and Deutch’s Seberg. More importantly, they all inhabit some essential part of each real-world figure’s personality. And that despite Marbeck and Dullin never having acted in a film before. Both were found, Linklater said, after he and the casting director went through hundreds of other candidates.
Marbeck confessed that he previously had tried to become a director, among most other jobs in the movie business, but concluded he wasn’t any good at telling others what to do. Nevertheless, Hackford called Marbeck’s Godard “diabolical, and fun.”
“It was not so hard to imagine (some of Godard’s misadventures making the film) because this was happening to me,” Marbeck said. “To me, a career – this is a big word – I felt embodying him was a challenge because he wasn’t here to tell me if was good.”
Linklater said he created his film with the hope that it might spark new interest not just in Godard’s seminal work but that of many other directors of the time. Thus, his film puts lower-third real-world identities on-screen for perhaps three dozen of the characters as they appear in the film.
Perhaps, he said, budding cinephiles with a Netflix account will look up the extraordinary work of older notables such as Jean-Pierre Melville, Robert Bresson, Eric Rohmer. Roberto Rossellini, and Jean Cocteau, and New Wavers such as Francois Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Alan Resnais, and Jacques Rivette.
For an older cinephile who first saw Breathless in a college film course, I’d heartily embrace however possible fans come to great films of that original Nouvelle Vague, or New Wave. It may leave them breathless too.
After its qualifying theatrical run, Nouvelle Vague will be available on Netflix for streaming in the United States. Watch the trailer below: