Nouvelle vague

Definitely not one of Godard's best. For his later works I recommend Passion and Forever Mozart instead of this film. Nouvelle vague has some very beautiful scenes, the music fits well, and like all his later works it's calm and fresh. The dialogues and the story are very much nonsense though. Some quotes snapped my attention and got me thinking long after I left the movie theatre, but most were not much to care about. Too many quotes makes it confusing. Maybe I would have liked it better if I knew French and Italian. 3+ / 5

Godard's (or anyone's) greatest film features fading matinee-idol Alain Delon and the beautiful, enormously talented Domiziana Giordano as archetypal Man and Woman at the end of the twentieth century. The image track tells one story (a narrative involving characters who gradually swap dominant and submissive relationship roles) and the sound track another (the dialogue consists almost entirely of literary quotations from Dante to Proust to Rimbaud to Raymond Chandler, etc.) yet both frequently intersect to create a rich tapestry of sight & sound. Godard uses dialectics involving man and woman, Europe and America, art and commerce, sound and image & upper and lower class to create a supremely beautiful work of art that functions as an affirmation of the possibility of love in the modern world (and a new poetics of cinema) and that also serves as a curiously optimistic farewell to socialism. Unusual for late-Godard is the constantly tracking and craning camera courtesy of the peerless William Lubtchansky.

This is an empty shell of a film, washed up and abandoned by the vibrancy which once pulsed through the Godard canon. The fresh approach from the sixties has 'matured' into little more than a largely fruitless exercise in intellectual pretension, occasionally engaging (the mere presence of Alain Delon is enough for this), but more often than not wilfully obfuscatory and infuriatingly half-baked.

The editing is as lively as ever but serves for little when used to accompany the thin story of the countess (Domiziana Giordano trying ever so hard to be enigmatic) and her shady business dealings. There are too many only half-explored ideas, such as the familiar Marxist class considerations, expressed in cod philosophical voice-over musings, for the film to achieve a satisfactory sense of wholeness. Indeed, superficially clever but ultimately meaningless assertions such as `Maybe a man isn't enough for a woman, or perhaps he's too much' would be more in place in the glossy surroundings of a Calvin Klein advert. The title acts as an ironic and sad reminder of what the director once was, but I get the feeling he isn't really trying any more.

Vague is the important word here. It's a shame that Godard spoils the memory of a truly remarkable genre of films in using the title, New Wave, for this disappointing effort from 1990. Vague is screen legend, Alain Delon's expression throughout the film; vague is the message which Godard fails to communicate; vague is the attempt which the auteur makes to be innovative and relevant, so many years after his genius first sparked revolution in the seventh art.

Down to the nitty-gritty: Godard attempts a film whose dialogue is based on a mixture of abrasive, noisy hyper-realism, and sombre, philosophic truisms. In this sense he achieves some grade of success. The film skips on at it's own idiosyncratic pace, jerking one way, and then another, through the landscape of late-Twentieth-Century, European capitalism and empty, absurd avarice. Some of these jagged, philosophical bursts of conversation are successfully framed by the mechanical and natural surrounds in a manner unique to Godard. He disdains obvious narrative constructs in favour of a more jarring technique, throwing together literary and cinematic quotations to raise questions which seem never to be answered. However, many of the ideas presented appear overly contrived and incoherent, almost as if he has given up attempting to resolve any of the larger philosophical issues, and instead satisfies himself with an indulgent, dignified surrender to the inevitable.

Domiziana Giordano's performance, as the ponderous, Italian heiress Elena Torlato-Favrini, is more irritating than poetically captivating, as might have been the director's intention. Her limited emotional range, her unnecessary mix of languages, and Alain Delon's almost bemused reaction leaves a tone of falsity and pretension hanging in the air, and ringing in the viewer's ear. Delon himself seems lost and miscast in his double role of hapless, taciturn, accident victim Roger Lennox, and his self-assured, gregarious twin, Richard. The film's confused, and ultimately superfluous plot, restricts his potential to inject any significant improvisation, charisma or depth into either of these crude alter egos. If anything, he is more successful depicting the ambitious, devil-may-care doppelganger than portraying the silent, submissive apprentice, reluctantly introduced into the shallow world of Godard's European upper classes.

Visually, of course, Nouvelle Vague has many of the marks of the great French filmmaker. He paints, with the excellent collaboration of cinematographer William Lubtchansky, visions derived from a world comprised of memory and half-understood dreams. Nostalgia is always on the threshold, as Godard revisits the luxuriant, natural environment of his youth, now lit with late evening shadows and golden autumn tones. Also to be welcomed are the touches of humour which offer some relief from the cumbersome, and often clichéd, musings of the various characters. Chief amongst the running jokes is the existential angst, represented by a recurring question pronounced by Raoul Dorfman's (Christophe Odent) beautiful, young, trophy girlfriend (Maria Pitarresi): "What will I do ?" His pragmatic response: "Admire the nature"; "admire the architecture"; "admire the furniture !". Less welcome is the discordant soundtrack, which makes viewing the film a decidedly uncomfortable experience.

It's not possible for me at this point to go through every Godard film, but it's also of no interest. Naturally, I may be missing shades or nuance of his film personality, but what's of interest to me, is to be able to see in these snapshots removed by time how he has evolved or stayed the same, how the old conundrums are expressed in new ways and is there a chronicle here of time gone.

The title here may be in reference to a number of things, what I get from it though, is the transfiguration of New Wave expression. None of the subsequent Godard films I've seen has been any less New Wave than his New Wave films, but what is New Wave now, as opposed to thirty years ago?

It stands out immediately to me that his Michel Poiccards have aged, that Godard has aged with them, mellowed perhaps by a certain failure to become instruments in the shaping of a better world, by a recognition that they're still standing on the same inscrutable dilemmas about love and death and that a wind of change didn't sweep them up or passed them by. Godard approaches politics here, as he did before. This time, the bitter realization of an unjust world is spoken not by romantic fools in the middle of an irreverent crime spree, but corporate people in suits and ties as they strike business deals. This is done without the gloating of triumph, like perhaps the Michel Poiccards and Pierrots grew up to inevitably conform and ruminate.

Alain Delon walks through this with sometimes a look of curious dispassion, sometimes weary astonishment, with a contradiction. As with Prenom Carmen, I see in Godard a willingness to meditate on the nature of things, to let go and be at peace. His characters quip philosophically in constant verbiage, but the film pauses to observe, to record branches of trees or clouds passing over a dark sun. The contradiction, as it were, is rooted for me in a certain kind of acceptance, or the dawning of it. This world may not be better, what these people dreamed in their youth, but it's not so bad either.

One line particularly stands out for me in this acceptance. "There is no higher judge; what isn't resolved by love, stays in suspense". This is one of the most beautiful things I've heard in film, and more, knowing a little of Godard, the contrast amazes me.

Alphaville ends with a similar declaration of the importance of love, but it comes in a point in time for Godard that I feel unconvinced by it, do I take it seriously or is it also part of the joke. Here it's done without irony.

This is important for me not only because it points a way out of the mind, but because it celebrates a meaningful universe even at the absence of a higher decree. If Godard's life and work is narrative, and this is what I'm pursuing in my quest, Nouvelle Vague would make for a soaring finale. But it's not a finale, so things are bound to get even more interesting.