By Dennis Hartley
(Originally posted on Digby’s Hullabaloo on December 6, 2025)
A film should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order. –Jean Luc-Godard
In my 2022 tribute to Jean-Luc Godard, I wrote:
Speaking of “non-linear”, that reminds me of a funny story (well, not “ha-ha” funny). I once had the privilege of seeing the late Jean Luc-Godard in the flesh before I had seen any of his films. […]
Be advised that this will not an assessment of his oeuvre. No one could accuse me of being a Godard scholar; out of his 40+ feature films, I’ve seen 12. And out of that relative handful, the only two I have felt compelled to watch more than once are Breathless and Alphaville.
The aptly entitled Breathless still knocks the wind out of me; it was (and remains) a freewheeling, exhilarating poke in the lens of conventional film making. And…sodamsexy. Despite its flouting of the rules, the film is (possibly) Godard’s most easily digestible work. Over the years, his films would become ever more challenging (or downright maddening). […]
Which brings us back to the news of Godard’s passing this week. I suddenly remembered attending an event in the early 80s that featured Pauline Kael and Jean-Luc Godard onstage somewhere discussing (wait for it) film. But since my memory has been playing tricks as of late (I mean, I’m 66…however the hell that happened), I thought I’d consult someone who was there with me…my pal Digby. She not only confirmed that she and I and my girlfriend at the time did indeed pile into Digby’s Volkswagen to see Kael and Godard (at the Marin Civic Center in Mill Valley, as it turns out), but somehow dug up a transcript of the proceedings.
There was much lamenting and gnashing of teeth when we realized this happened 41 flippin’ years ago (oh, to be in my mid-20s again). Anyway, the evening was billed as “The Economics of Film Criticism: A Debate with Jean Luc-Godard and Pauline Kael” (May 7, 1981). I recall primarily being super-jazzed about seeing Kael (I was more familiar with her work than Godard’s). I can’t recall a word either of them said, of course, but I do remember my surprise at how engaging and effusive Godard was (I had fully expected to see the “enfant terrible”).
You do get to see a bit of Godard, the enfant terrible in Richard Linklater’s très meta Nouvelle Vague, a heady and freewheeling backstage drama/fan fiction about the making of Breathless, the film that ushered in the French New Wave movement.
Speaking of “new wave”, I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that, despite the time period it recounts (with great verisimilitude) …there is something very punk rock about Linklater’s film. From a BBC Radio 6 piece:
When about 40 people saw the Sex Pistols at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester on 4 June 1976, they came away inspired. But they were inspired in a very Mancunian kind of way. Many people in the audience that night didn’t look at the Pistols and so much think: “I want to do that…” but instead, they looked at the young Londoners and thought “Come on, I could do way better than that!”
It’s thanks to that very Mancunian approach that we have some of the most thrilling music of the last 40 years. The creativity that sprang from the Lesser Free Trade Hall would loom large over the Manchester scene for decades. Without that 4 June gig – and the Pistols return visit six weeks later – there would be no Buzzcocks, Magazine, Joy Division, New Order, Factory Records, no ‘indie’ scene, no The Fall, The Smiths, Hacienda, Madchester, Happy Mondays or Oasis. […]
[Among a number of other future music luminaries] Morrissey was there. He “penned an epistle” about it to the NME. Morrissey would never merely write a letter. He was slightly sniffy about what he saw: “Despite their discordant music and barely audible audacious lyrics, they were called back for two encores.” He was sure he could do better.
Roll the clock back about 20 years before the Sex Pistols’ gig. Nouvelle Vague opens with the Paris premiere of Jacques Dupont’s La Passe du diablet. Among the attendees are Cahiers du Cinema film critics Godard (Guillaume Marbeck), Francois Truffaut (Adrien Rouyard), and Claude Chabrol (Antoine Besson). Also present are several more future film making luminaries. At the soiree afterwards, Godard makes no bones about his revulsion, saying (in so many words) “Come on, I could do way better than that!” (the Morrissey of his day?).
In 1959, Godard (emboldened by the massive success of Truffaut’s 400 Blows) makes the leap from critiquing to directing. Working from a “true crime” film idea by Truffaut about a French car thief and his American girlfriend, Godard casts then-unknown Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin) and American star Jean Seberg for the leads, and enlists war photographer Raoul Coutard (Matthieu Penchinat ) as DP.
From the first day on set (which seems to go nowhere fast), Godard’s producer, crew, and cast (with the possible exception of a happy-go-lucky Belmondo) are chagrined to learn that working with this neophyte director is going to be, at best, a trying experience. For example, Seberg (the most seasoned participant) is mortified that Godard is writing the script while he films (the idea of “rehearsals” amuses him to no end).
Despite their initial discomfort with Godard’s spontaneous, guerilla-style approach, the sense of unfettered creative freedom it unleashes becomes quite liberating for all involved (including this viewer).
That’s the beauty of what Linklater has achieved here; he not only offers a “fly on the wall” perspective with an uncanny recreation of the original production (right down to the camera work, film stock and screen ratio), but renews your faith in a medium that has become more about bombast, box office, and back end than characters, concept, and conflict. Maybe its time to hit the “reset” button. And who knows…maybe some future innovator will watch Nouvelle Vague and say to themselves, “Come on…I could do way better than that!”
(Nouvelle Vague is currently streaming on Netflix)