Film Review
By the late 1980s, it was looking as if the careers of two of French cinema's
biggest names - Alain Delon and Jean-Luc Godard - were well and truly over.
Once one of France's most bankable film stars, Delon was virtually box office
poison in the 1980s and few of the films he made in this decade made a decent
(or indeed any) return. Even commendable films like Bertrand
Blier's
Notre histoire
(1984), in which he gave a stunning performance, struggled to find approval
with critics and audiences. Meanwhile, Godard was doing a good job
of alienating his dwindling band of followers with such flagrant bouts of
advanced nombrilism as
King Lear
(1987). A decade previously, it would have been inconceivable that
Alain Delon and Jean-Luc Godard would ever work together. In the late
1980s, in the slough of their respective careers, it had a kind of perverse
inevitability about it. The collaboration was not a success.
Nouvelle Vague looks as if it may have been intended as an adjunct
to Godard's monolithic
Histoire(s) du cinéma series.
Godard himself admits that it was meant to be an allegory of the history
of cinema, with Elena (Domiziana Giordano) representing the business side
of the industry and Roger/Richard (Delon) the filmmaker both before and after
the French New Wave (first the willing slave to commercial necessity, then
the liberated auteur). The film is sufficiently vague and incoherent
for this interpretation to fly unnoticed over the heads of most people who
watch it; indeed, it seems far more natural to read into it a wry commentary
on the sexual revolution of the 20th century - with the role of the man and
the woman inverted in the film to avoid making this seem too obvious.
Nouvelle Vague certainly loses a large portion of its mystique (and
virtually all of its credibility) once Godard's own interpretation of it
has been revealed to you. If we are to take his thesis seriously, the
Franco-Swiss filmmaker would have us believe that, without the French New
Wave, cinema would have long since perished, driven to destruction by commercial
forces, never to return. His view is that the revolution he spearheaded
with fellow warriors François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol and Jacques
Rivette is what saved cinema and gave today's filmmakers as much control
over their industry as the moneymen.
If this is indeed Godard's
view (and you can
never tell for sure whether he is being sincere
or ironic) he must be deluding himself - or else ineffably naive.
No one would dispute that the French New Wave helped to revitalise cinema
in the late '50s, early '60s, although its main achievement (and most enduring
legacy) was to
massively raise the profile of French cinema outside
France around this time. But to suggest that cinema was on its death-bed
in the late 1950s and could only be brought back to life by Godard and his
merry band of cinephilic crusaders is absurd in the extreme. Cinema
today is pretty well what it has been for the last hundred years, with the
same schism between its commercial and auteur wings, and a comparable degree
of diversity. Anyone who argues otherwise (and there are many that
do) can only have a shallow or highly selective knowledge of film history.
If
Nouvelle Vague is anything to go by, Jean-Luc Godard appears obsessed
with exaggerating his place in history, raising a marble, gold-embossed monument
to the French New Wave that, frankly, it hardly merits.
If Godard's assessment of the worth of the French New Wave is crass or cynically
disingenuous over-statement, then his film
Nouvelle Vague is ten times
more so. It is a turgid, rambling, incoherent mess of a film - one
that gloriously trowels on the literary and filmic allusions like an ageing
prostitute desperately plastering her withered visage with makeup. If
your primary motivation for watching a film is spotting literary references
then
Nouvelle Vague will no doubt be an unbounded delight - practically
every word spoken is a quotation from somewhere. Some of the allusions are
so obvious that their constant onslaught soon becomes irritating; others
are so infuriatingly arcane that you can scarcely stop yourself from reaching
for your can of pretentiousness repellent (i.e. the off-switch on your TV/DVD
player).
William Lubtchansky's gorgeous photography at least makes the film attractive
to look at, and Godard's skill at assembling a film (the sound and the images
- both equally important) is as keen as ever.
Nouvelle Vague
has the same trickly dreamlike quality, that impression of something dark
and sinister coasting along beneath an invitingly smooth surface, that made
Godard's earlier great films such an intense and visceral viewing experience.
And yet it all feels so crushingly vain and vacuous - a perfectly constructed
casket with no message inside it. A nauseating odour of complacency
and self-aggrandizement surrounds this film, and if it is a metaphor of any
kind it is one that makes apparent the absurdity of Godard's assertion that
the French New Wave was cinema's saviour. It's surprising
Nouvelle Vague
didn't finish off Delon's career for good - virtually no one saw the film
when it came out, so he was spared another public humiliation.
© James Travers 2016
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Next Jean-Luc Godard film:
Hélas pour moi (1993)