Nouvelle vague (1990)
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard

Film Review

By the late 1980s, it was looking as if the careers of two of French cinema's biggest names - Alain Delon and Jean-Luc Godard - were well and truly over.  Once one of France's most bankable film stars, Delon was virtually box office poison in the 1980s and few of the films he made in this decade made a decent (or indeed any) return.   Even commendable films like Bertrand Blier's Notre histoire (1984), in which he gave a stunning performance, struggled to find approval with critics and audiences.  Meanwhile, Godard was doing a good job of alienating his dwindling band of followers with such flagrant bouts of advanced nombrilism as King Lear (1987).  A decade previously, it would have been inconceivable that Alain Delon and Jean-Luc Godard would ever work together.  In the late 1980s, in the slough of their respective careers, it had a kind of perverse inevitability about it.  The collaboration was not a success.

Nouvelle Vague looks as if it may have been intended as an adjunct to Godard's monolithic Histoire(s) du cinéma series.  Godard himself admits that it was meant to be an allegory of the history of cinema, with Elena (Domiziana Giordano) representing the business side of the industry and Roger/Richard (Delon) the filmmaker both before and after the French New Wave (first the willing slave to commercial necessity, then the liberated auteur).  The film is sufficiently vague and incoherent for this interpretation to fly unnoticed over the heads of most people who watch it; indeed, it seems far more natural to read into it a wry commentary on the sexual revolution of the 20th century - with the role of the man and the woman inverted in the film to avoid making this seem too obvious.

Nouvelle Vague certainly loses a large portion of its mystique (and virtually all of its credibility) once Godard's own interpretation of it has been revealed to you.  If we are to take his thesis seriously, the Franco-Swiss filmmaker would have us believe that, without the French New Wave, cinema would have long since perished, driven to destruction by commercial forces, never to return.  His view is that the revolution he spearheaded with fellow warriors François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol and Jacques Rivette is what saved cinema and gave today's filmmakers as much control over their industry as the moneymen.  If this is indeed Godard's view (and you can never tell for sure whether he is being sincere or ironic) he must be deluding himself - or else ineffably naive.

No one would dispute that the French New Wave helped to revitalise cinema in the late '50s, early '60s, although its main achievement (and most enduring legacy) was to massively raise the profile of French cinema outside France around this time.  But to suggest that cinema was on its death-bed in the late 1950s and could only be brought back to life by Godard and his merry band of cinephilic crusaders is absurd in the extreme.  Cinema today is pretty well what it has been for the last hundred years, with the same schism between its commercial and auteur wings, and a comparable degree of diversity.  Anyone who argues otherwise (and there are many that do) can only have a shallow or highly selective knowledge of film history.  If Nouvelle Vague is anything to go by, Jean-Luc Godard appears obsessed with exaggerating his place in history, raising a marble, gold-embossed monument to the French New Wave that, frankly, it hardly merits.

If Godard's assessment of the worth of the French New Wave is crass or cynically disingenuous over-statement, then his film Nouvelle Vague is ten times more so.  It is a turgid, rambling, incoherent mess of a film - one that gloriously trowels on the literary and filmic allusions like an ageing prostitute desperately plastering her withered visage with makeup.  If your primary motivation for watching a film is spotting literary references then Nouvelle Vague will no doubt be an unbounded delight - practically every word spoken is a quotation from somewhere. Some of the allusions are so obvious that their constant onslaught soon becomes irritating; others are so infuriatingly arcane that you can scarcely stop yourself from reaching for your can of pretentiousness repellent (i.e. the off-switch on your TV/DVD player).

William Lubtchansky's gorgeous photography at least makes the film attractive to look at, and Godard's skill at assembling a film (the sound and the images - both equally important) is as keen as ever.  Nouvelle Vague has the same trickly dreamlike quality, that impression of something dark and sinister coasting along beneath an invitingly smooth surface, that made Godard's earlier great films such an intense and visceral viewing experience.  And yet it all feels so crushingly vain and vacuous - a perfectly constructed casket with no message inside it.  A nauseating odour of complacency and self-aggrandizement surrounds this film, and if it is a metaphor of any kind it is one that makes apparent the absurdity of Godard's assertion that the French New Wave was cinema's saviour.  It's surprising Nouvelle Vague didn't finish off Delon's career for good - virtually no one saw the film when it came out, so he was spared another public humiliation.

Film Synopsis

Elena Torlato-Favrini, an incredibly rich and successful businesswoman, lives on a vast country estate in Switzerland.  Whilst out driving one day, she sees an older man lying on the side of the road and comes to his aid.  The man, Roger Lennox, soon becomes Elena's lover and a handsome addition to her dull entourage of lackeys and advisers.  Roger is willing to please but seems to have no drive of his own.  He does only what is required of him.  During a boating trip Elena watches dispassionately as Roger drowns.  Not long afterwards, Elena is visited by a man who is the exact likeness of her dead lover.  Claiming to be Lennox's brother, he coerces Elena into allowing him to run one of her companies.  The boating incident is repeated, only this time it is Elena who ends up in the water...