The first time I saw the movie
Breathless, it blew my mind. But not in the way you might think. Because I am talking about the 1982 remake of the groundbreaking Jean Luc Goddard film from 1960 that revolutionized the film industry and ushered in a new term,
New Wave. I was twelve at the time and Richard Gere's portrayal of the charming but doomed car thief infatuated with a French college student in Los Angeles was about the coolest thing I had ever seen onscreen.
Later, I discovered an older and more classic, even cooler, sort of cool when I watched the original French film in college. And that was roughly the same time I discovered Richard Linklater, whose independent film
Slacker was a sort of ground zero for a new revolution of film in America at the end of the twentieth century.
And now those two cinematic revolutions, which were an epiphany for me in terms of art and filmmaking, come together in
Nouvelle Vague, the latest film from Linklater that tells the story of the making of Goddard's
Breathless. I plan to revisit both the 1990s and the 1960s tonight when I fire up Netflix (another revolution in film to be honest), reveling in
"Linklater's Ode to Breathless."
Richard Linklater’s “Nouvelle Vague,” a film about filmmaking, is suffused with intoxicating glamour — the glamour of youth, of beauty, of grand aesthetic pursuits, Paris at twilight and, bien sûr, cinema itself. Set largely in Paris in 1959 and almost entirely in French, it revisits the title movement that was embodied by young moviemakers who upended and disregarded cinematic norms with the kinds of stories they were telling and, crucially, how. With new attitudes, techniques, technologies, casts, crews and with one another’s support, they were borrowing from the past, engaging with the present and creating the future.
“A whole galaxy of young people,” the filmmaker Pierre Kast said that year to Jean-Luc Godard, “are in the process of taking the old Bastille of the French cinema by assault.”
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