After a triumphal debut in Cannes with a lot of long standing ovation arrives in the Nouvelle Vague rooms, the story of the birth of the most ruptured movement of film history through the eyes of legendary Richard Linklater. The film, released by Lucky Red, has been in the cinemas since March 5.
Nouvelle Vague: cinema pirata
Paris, 1959. The various members of the Cahiers du Cinema group (Truffaut, Chabrol, Rivette, Rohmer) filmed their films, beginning discussions on a so-called new wave, a nouvelle vague of the seventh art. Everyone had their own film debut except Jean-Luc Godard. Chaotic, ambitious, with a thousand ideas on the head but the feet too little on the ground to bring them to completion, at the end also the young Jean-Luc has his chance to direct a subject written by his most famous friend Truffaut: Until the last breath. But to realize his vision of a completely new cinema, the debutant director will have to convince actors and teachers to forget everything they know and trust him..
Le cose e perché le facciamo
Reveal my hand immediately: contrary to most criticism, what I am about to do is not an ecstatic review, indeed. And this is not because I believe the Nouvelle Vague a movement unworthy of being told, indeed. It’s not even because he has Linklater antipathy, which is indeed one of the directors I’m more concerned: if he were someone else to sin of superficiality in a similar way I would probably be able to forgive him much more. Because Nouvelle Vague is also a relatively pleasant film if we take it in the void. But for the love of heaven, nothing happens in the void. The things we do exist in a context, and that context is an ineludible preacher of their reading.
The reasons I have a problem with this movie exist in two directions. Number one: Linklater decided to make a film about the birth of a new cinema; an instinctive, mobile, aggressive cinema, placed in opposition to the values and ways of doing traditional of the time. And, in order to do so, he decided to use the most acritically conventional cinematographic language, perfectly aligned with the values and ways of making contemporary institutional cinema, moreover in a black and white at least delicious. And we’re not talking about any debut but Richard Linklater, the process director par excellence, one who has never been afraid to take the way the cinema is produced and dismantle it, turn it, play it, reassemble it. Saying that you are celebrating something and celebrating it seriously are two distinct actions.
Nouvelle Vague, confusione e sottotesti
Direction number two, it’s a film that doesn’t know how to pore with Godard-person. The Godard represented in this film is a visionary, but he is also a deeply mediocre man: indolent, capricious, vain, unable to trust his collaborators, one who arrived where he is and had a chance only because he has the right friends, not explicitly but spiritually trumpet. Which absolutely seems to align with the historic Godard, notorious piece of mud. But then why instead of a portrait of chiaroscuro the tone of the film ends up being so agiographic, so piatously celebratory and glorifying?
Ultimately, it’s been days and I still can’t understand. What is not clear to me above all is whether with Nouvelle Vague Linklater he only took a forgetable chant, or he is playing the “cinema sul cinema” tout-court. What is certain is that this is the opposite of a love letter.
Il cast
Guillame Marbeck is Jean-Luc Godard, both visionary and indisposable director. Zoey Deutch and Aubry Dullin play Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo, actors who interpret the protagonists of Until the last breath and who from the film will be consecrated forever. Bruno Dreyfüsrt is Georges “Beau-beau” Beauregard, producer of the film that tries in vain to keep the production in line, while Matthieu Penchinat is Raoul Coutard, a legendary cameraman. Finally, Adrien Rouyard, Antoine Besson and Jodie Ruth-Forest play the Cahiers group: Truffaut, Chabrol and Suzanne Schiffman respectively.
L’articolo Nouvelle Vague is the opposite of a love letter – The review comes from Dituttounpop.it.
