Breathless, a perennial French New Wave film that started everything and changed filmmaking forever, is closely reenacted and memorialized along with the movement and people involved. I got to admit, being a diehard Godard-head, I was very skeptical going into this film. But rest assured, Linklater, coming from the experimental indie filmmaking background, knows his history of cinema and understands how to pay homage without being nostalgic and sentimental about the New Wave and its influences that had on him as a filmmaker. And Linklater's assumption is right about his view on Breathless as a granddaddy of indie filmmaking.
Casting and working with French speaking actors, Linklater commands a very convincing reenactment of the events in and surrounding the production of Godard's tumultuous feature debut.
Godard, played wonderfully by Guillaume Marbeck, encouraged by/and riding the coattails of the success of his two Cahier du Cinema colleagues' directorial debuts not too long ago - François Truffaut's 400 Blows (1959) and Claude Chabrol's Le Beau Serge (1958), finally tries his hands in directing a feature, with the help of a producer Beaureguard (Bruno Dreyfürst). With the rebellious spirit of countering the cinema that came before, and his own eccentricities, Godard embarks on directing a film as unconventionally as possible. Working off of a thin treatment that Truffaut and Chabrol wrote, about real life incidents of a car thief who ends up killing a police officer, Godard charges on Breathless without a script. Casting includes a newbie actor/boxer named Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin) and a reluctant American movie star Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch). In 23 days of shooting with no lights and all hand-held camera by army vet, documentary photographer Raoul Coutard (Matthieu Penchinat), who later went on to shoot most of the memorable Godard films.
Linklater makes sure that who's who of the French New Wave are all mentioned in the film- portrait style with their names appearing on the screen - Truffaut, Chabrol, Suzanne Schiffman, Rivette, Rohmer, Rozier, etc. Godard's mentors/idols also appear on screen - Jean Pierre Melville, Roberto Rosselini, Jean Cocteau and even has a run in with Robert Bresson in the subway where the master is in his production of Pickpocket, around the same time.
Sure, championed by Cahier writers, including Truffaut and Godard, The Auteur Theory elevates the director as the primary creative force behind a film, but Linklater shows and acknowledges that there are a lot of people contributing their talents and hard work and time in making a film - that extends to the job of an assistant director, script continuity, make-up, editor, so and so forth.
Yes, the film's monochrome shot on 35mm and impeccable period set design and costume take us into a nostalgia trip. But the film is never corny or sentimental. Linklater is after something more direct, only concentrating on the production of Breathless; people involved in it and the overall climate that incubated the French New Wave.
It's a lovely, charming and endlessly enjoyable homage to one of the most influential film movements and which birthed perhaps the most singular and unique filmmaker ever lived. Loved it.
