Nouvelle vague

When I was younger, I used to feel jealousy towards people who clicked with stuff like this, but now I think I might pity them.

This film's Godard at his lamest and most frustrating. It's pretty much unwatchable. If I have to give him credit, I guess he could've made Nouvelle Vague longer. An 89-minute runtime might suggest some restraint, but it felt much longer.

Godard's a director whose well-known stuff I watched some time ago and kind of liked, but it only took a couple of deep cuts for me to get the sense his style was generally not for me. This is one I wanted to give a chance, because it's been years since I saw a Godard film and Alain Delon was in it, but I found it more insufferable than anything else by Godard I'd seen before.

Characters speak about nothing, every scene is tedious, everything feels meaningless, and if that's the point somehow I don't care and still don't like it. This just sucks.

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.

Most people will not like this film. It's difficult to understand what's going on in the narrative. This isn't uncommon in Godard's work, but it's especially true of his later work. I've seen, besides New Wave, First Name: Carmen, Hail Mary, and his segment from the omnibus opera film Aria. That segment is actually one of his best works as well. Sticking with the two other features, they are both interesting and beautiful but very slow films. New Wave seems a lot like them at first, especially in its confusing narrative (I had to read a synopsis on it to find out exactly what the plot was). It shares their beauty, but its even more pronounced. If I were advising someone on this film, I would tell them to disregard the narrative completely. Just watch it for its pictorial beauty. And its sound. Godard's experiments in sound have always been one of the most prominent traits of his cinema. It goes back at least to Une femme est une femme, way back in '62. This film contains the most interesting experiments in sound. The music is absolutely beautiful, and, like many of his other films, it stops abruptly, pops back up when you're not expecting it, and shifts volumes randomly. The sound effects are also quite beautiful. While New Wave was perhaps dull in its narrative (it's an examination of capitalism and consumerism), who cares? This is film. Film is a visual medium, and this is a visual masterpiece. Remember: RES, NON VERBA ("things, not words," an intertitle that appears frequently in the film). Oh, and Alain Delon, star of such great films as Rocco and His Brothers, stars. He's still a major stud! 9/10.

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.

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.