I’ve recently returned from the Cannes film festival, which was very nice, thanks for asking. Plenty of movies, hours of queuing, plus a side order of those weird juxtapositions that you only get at an event that thinks nothing of hosting the launch party for a social realist Romanian film about the underclass on the deck of a billionaire’s yacht. My brief conversation with Robert De Niro was drowned out by screaming fans of Tom Cruise. A Brazilian climate change activist picketed Kevin Spacey’s gala dinner. Last week a palm tree fell down and injured a passing film producer. So far as I’m aware, this was the only major mishap.
The festival loves films and it loves films about films. But what Cannes especially loves is films that either reference or feature the Cannes film festival. It has been said that the one sure-fire means of having your movie selected is to include a quick shout-out to Cannes, or a scene on the French Riviera. Last year’s opening picture, Quentin Dupieux’s The Second Act (2024), contained a bunch of sparring actors who hold the event in high esteem, while the noxious Grace of Monaco (2014) naturally swung by for a lengthy visit. Mia Hansen-Love’s Bergman Island (2021) had its lovers pine for Cannes from the safety of a Swedish artists’ hideaway. Rocketman (2019), I recall, climaxed with a rehash of the “I’m Still Standing” video, which was shot on the beach of Cannes’s luxury Carlton hotel.
This year’s Cannes-centric affair was Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague, a jaunty behind-the-scenes tour of the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960) – that insouciant, jump-cutting tour-de-force of noir cinema. The film’s subject matter dictates that most of the action takes place in a modish postwar Paris (bistros, Gauloises, sleek black Citroen cars). All the same, Nouvelle Vague features an extended sequence in which Godard (well played by newcomer Guillaume Marbeck) raids the office kitty in order to fund a road trip down to Cannes. Seated inside the festival’s main theatre, then, we were treated to the sight of the young director seated inside the very same main theatre. It felt like being led around and around Escher’s staircase.
Godard died in September 2022, which means we can only guess what he would have made of Nouvelle Vague. The chances are he would have hated it. A few years back, the festival cleared space for Michel Hazanavicius’s Redoubtable (2019), which was set in the revolutionary spring of 1968 and showed Godard (on this occasion impersonated by Louis Garrel) manning the barricades in – you guessed it – Cannes. When Godard angrily denounced the film as “a stupid, stupid idea”, Hazanavicius promptly used it as a blurb quote on the poster. In showbusiness, as elsewhere, there is rarely such a thing as bad publicity.
It’s easy to be exasperated by cinema’s seemingly endless capacity for self-regard, but I wound up liking Nouvelle Vague. It’s a much better movie than Redoubtable, in part because it maintains a lovely balance of affection and irreverence, innocence and cynicism. Crucially, Linklater catches 29-year-old Godard at his most gauche and self-conscious, when the man was still earning his crust as a critic and furiously envied his colleagues (Truffaut, Rohmer, Chabrol) who had already made the leap to the director’s chair. He is, in short, a bumptious little squirt in the manner of most great artists who have yet to be assured that they are great artists. He’s capricious and annoying, but there’s still something charming about him.
Compare Nouvelle Vague to Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value – another film in competition at Cannes – and it looks more charming still. Here, Stellan Skarsgard plays a ruthless (fictional) director called Gustav Borg, who chivvies his daughters and grandson into performing in his latest piece of autofiction. Obviously, we’re supposed to view Borg as a bit of a tyrant: he’s a lusty old goat straight out of central casting. The quality of his work, however, is never remotely in doubt. On reading his script, even his daughters who hate him agree it’s a masterpiece. Sentimental Value is an excellent family drama: confident and supple and beautifully played. However, it still worships at the altar of the great white male artist.
What I like most about Nouvelle Vague is the way it cuts through the hype. The creative process, it says, is invariably a combination of scramble and bluff. Linklater implies that many (most?) films are made by fly-by-night chancers and that the business itself has at least a nodding acquaintance with crooks. “Artists and criminals are the same,” Godard boasts in one scene. In another, we see the respectable, middle-aged Roberto Rossellini (husband of Ingrid Bergman, father of Isabella) furtively scraping buffet sandwiches into his hat before cadging spare change off people he barely knows in the street. Institutions like Cannes assure us that these are great men. But they’re also shown to be small, petty ones.
More than that, Nouvelle Vague suggests that what we think of as genius is just outright ineptitude when viewed through a different lens. On set, making Breathless, Godard directs for two hours and then calls it quits for the day, explaining with a shrug that he’s run out of ideas. He doesn’t shoot enough coverage: that’s why all the jump cuts. The production of Breathless teeters on the brink of disaster. Most people involved think that the film is a stinker. Possibly – probably – Godard thinks so as well. To quote William Goldman, nobody knows anything – and it’s this uncertainty and confusion that keeps the art of film popping.
The Cannes film festival draws people from every rung of the career ladder. Some are the gilded and feted great artists who walk the red carpet every night, but the majority are callow, untried newbies, in town to drum up some interest. You can see them handing out business cards on the town’s promenade, or imploring stray journalists to watch their short films in the market. They’re living out of rucksacks; some sleep on the beach. One of them might turn out to be the next Jean-Luc Godard. We don’t know and they don’t know. It’s only history that will be the judge.
‘Nouvelle Vague’ is awaiting UK distribution
