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

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.

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.

How do you film the air for a movie? May you find the past with the help of present, or look for the present through the past? Where are the elements of life (nature, love, thoughts...) in the image that reflects the screen? Is it possible to talk and work with a symbol you never used thirty years ago? And which are the signs of second chances?

Like Hemingway's 'Along the River and Beyond the Trees', 'Nouvelle vague' is a film about the feelings of a mid-aged man in his relation with himself after a car-crash in a Middle Europe road. Godard himself lives around the place, in a beautiful scenery close to nature. The filmmaker, since 'A bout de souffle', smelled the flavor of the countryside. 'Nouvelle vague' is a film for senses. You hear-a-heart beating along the trees.

Bien pour Godard, Lubtchansky, Delon...

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.