It’s laborious to think about an American indie film extra appropriate for a Cannes red-carpet premiere than Richard Linklater‘s Nouvelle Vague. The maverick director’s black-and-white love letter to the French New Wave premiered to a rapturous response Saturday night time inside Cannes’ Palais des Festivals, drawing a 10-minute-plus standing ovation from the black-tie crowd.
“Cinema is magic,” Linklater mentioned as the home lights got here up contained in the cinema and the applause lastly started to dwindle.
The standing ovation even received began earlier than the lights got here on as the gang started clapping in unison for the love letter to French cinema.
Going into the night time, there was appreciable anticipation surrounding Linklater’s twenty third function. The movie wasn’t screened for critics prematurely of the premiere, because the director was mentioned to favor that or not it’s seen for the primary time on the massive display at its French premiere. The movie’s official abstract reads, merely: “This is the story of Godard making Breathless, told in the style and spirit in which Godard made Breathless.”
Shot on movie within the 4:3 side ratio and advised completely in French, Nouvelle Vague stars Guillaume Marbeck as Jean-Luc Godard, Zoey Deutch as Godard’s star Jean Seberg, and Aubry Dullin as Jean-Paul Belmondo. Linklater has mentioned that his mission for the film was “to show the absolute love of cineastes.”
Speaking of these, arch-cineaste Quentin Tarantino turned as much as help Linklater’s tribute to Godard. The two administrators got here to prominence collectively within the Nineties in the course of the American indie movie wave. Tarantino and Linklater shared a second earlier than the premiere screening, embracing contained in the cinema earlier than the lights went down, which drew hoots and cheers from the gang.
Linklater on set of ‘Nouvelle Vague’
Jean Louis Fernandez
Although famously good-natured and avuncular, not like his mercurial genius that’s the film’s topic, Linklater is in some ways simply the appropriate Austin dude to tackle the French New Wave’s revolutionary spirit of cinematic invention. Across his 35-year profession, which started with the shoestring-budget comedy-drama Slacker (1990), Linklater has regularly dipped out and in of conference, testing the medium’s formal boundaries. His filmography spans generation-defining coming-of-age comedies like Dazed and Confused (1993), the Before trilogy — Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004), and Before Midnight (2013) — and School of Rock (2003); revolutionary animated options like Waking Life (2001) and A Scanner Darkly (2006); crime comedies with existential overtones equivalent to Bernie (2011) and Hit Man (2023); interval items like Me and Orson Welles (2008) and Blue Moon (2024); the decade-spanning American masterpiece Boyhood (2014), and extra.
Nouvelle Vague now marks his first movie shot completely in France. The screenplay is from Vince Palmo, Michèle Halberstadt, Laetitia Masson, and Holly Gent, whereas David Chambille dealt with the cinematography. Paris-based gross sales agent Goodfellas is purchasing the mission to international distributors in Cannes.
Godard’s Breathless (À bout de souffle, 1960), is among the nice landmarks of the French New Wave. The film follows Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a small-time felony on the run after killing a policeman, and his romantic entanglement with Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg), an American journalism scholar in Paris. Loosely impressed by American movie noir, the movie famously blends style tropes with radical type. It marked Godard’s function debut and catapulted Belmondo and Seberg to worldwide fame. More than a criminal offense movie, it got here to be seen as a manifesto of cinematic rebel. The film-loving viewers within the Cannes premiere Saturday night time was in all probability cheering that legacy in addition to Linklater’s achievement.
