The New Yorker:

In its first week, the seventy-eighth film festival showcased new movies by Richard Linklater, Spike Lee, Lynne Ramsay, and Mascha Schilinski.

By Justin Chang

“When will this fucking movie be over with?” It’s a question that surfaces often at the Cannes Film Festival, where hour blurs into hour, movie bleeds into movie, and, by day nine or so, even a good picture can take on the quality of an endurance test. Seldom, though, do you hear an onscreen character actually express the sentiment aloud. In Richard Linklater’s ebullient, lovingly crafted “Nouvelle Vague,” which premièred at Cannes this past weekend, the question is posed by the actor Jean Seberg (played by Zoey Deutch) during a particularly trying stretch of production on “Breathless” (1960), the first feature directed by the celebrated young critic Jean-Luc Godard (Guillaume Marbeck). In time, of course, the finished film will become a sensation; it will help ignite the French New Wave, revolutionize the means and possibilities of independent filmmaking, transform Godard into a cinematic icon, and go down as one of the greatest, most influential débuts in film history. It will also become Seberg’s best-remembered work, after her death in 1979.

But none of that has come to pass yet in “Nouvelle Vague,” and Linklater shrewdly refuses to glance back at this epochal moment through the prism of hindsight. It’s 1959, and Seberg, a reluctant participant from the start, has spent much of the shoot venting her exasperation with Godard and “Breathless,” which, from her Hollywood-trained vantage, looks like a threadbare, rudderless folly. The production deploys no sets, no artificial light, and no synchronized sound. There is just a girl and a gun, and also a gangster, played by Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin), who takes to the experiment with a joie de vivre that Seberg cannot muster. Godard has no script, working instead from a treatment by his comrade François Truffaut, and also from ideas that come to mind before and during shooting; whenever inspiration runs dry, production wraps for the day. He scorns the pursuit of scene-to-scene continuity (“Reality is not continuity!” is one of many aphorisms that he barks at his collaborators) and has no use for shopworn notions of storytelling coherence.

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