American director Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague and Sylvain Chomet’s Marcel et Monsieur Pagnol – both of which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival at the weekend – prove that the art of making cinema is an endless source of inspiration.
With Nouvelle Vague, in the main competition at Cannes, Linklater pays homage to his idol, French director Jean-Luc Godard, by re-enacting the making of his iconic debut, 1959's Breathless.
Also celebrating a French cultural icon, director Sylvain Chomet – of The Triplets of Belleville and The Illusionist fame – lovingly brings the life and work of Marcel Pagnol to the screen in animation form, with A Magnificent Life.
Both films look back at pivotal moments in movie-making history and place writer-directors at the heart of their stories.
Godard's charisma
Using black and white film, with expertly designed sets and costumes, Linklater takes us back to Paris in the 1950s, in what he describes as “a love letter” to a period that saw the birth of the French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague) cinema movement.
Using the metatheatre technique – by which the film itself draws attention to its nature as a performance and the circumstances of its production – Linklater teases out Godard’s playful, and often irritating, approach to directing, thanks to an excellent cast.
Guillaume Marbeck as Godard is extremely charismatic, but also gawky at times. With his black sunglasses fixed to his face, cigarette permanently lit, he consults the crumpled little notebook kept in his jacket pocket, just like the real Godard.
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Linklater says it took him six months to find the right combination of lesser-known actors in order to “keep the magic” intact – just like the original cast of Breathless, who were young and carefree, working on a shoestring budget.
American actress Zoey Deutch as Jean Seberg and and Aubry Dullin as Jean-Paul Belmondo not only look like their 1950s counterparts, they master their voices, accents and gestures too. But even if they are playing real people, they don’t get bogged down in these details, bringing an electric energy and humour to the screen.
The film is structured around the 20 days spent shooting the film in the streets of Paris, with no formal script, just scribbles on bits of paper and napkins: the rest was inside Godard’s head.
Much to the chagrin of the film's harried producer, Georges de Beauregard, Godard would sometimes stop shooting after two hours, telling his actors he’d run out of inspiration for the day.
Little did Beauregard know, Breathless would go on to become one of the cult films of the Nouvelle Vague movement. Sotheby’s will auction part of an original manuscript written by Godard in Paris from 4 June, and judging by the enthusiasm of the Cannes crowd for Linklater's homage, the bids are likely to start high.
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Unlike with Godard’s film, nothing was left to chance in the making of Nouvelle Vague and the script is seamless, full of sharp, witty repartees and quotes – a delight for any cinema fan.
It’s a reminder that sometimes good storytelling doesn’t need a whole lot of artifice, but rather authenticity and spontaneity. As Godard said, all you need to make a plot is "a girl and a gun".
The cinema bug
For Marcel et Monsieur Pagnol (A Magnificent Life), Chomet spent years painstakingly making hand-drawn images, pulling together a delightful fresco of Pagnol's life from childhood to old age, with the protagonist voiced by French actor – and Cannes opening ceremony host – Laurent Lafitte.
He poignantly uses the ghost of Pagnol’s boyhood self as a catalyst to help the French novelist, playwright and filmmaker write his memoirs for a magazine column. Together, they relive events including the death of Pagnol’s mother and the Second World War.
Born at the turn of the 19th century, Pagnol made his name in theatre before catching the cinema bug with the arrival of the talkies.
Despite numerous setbacks, he stuck with film, even opening his own studio near Marseille.
Chomet, like Pagnol, makes a point of keeping the distinctive southern French accent in the mix – brushing aside any concerns from snobby Parisians. Loud, melodious and full of idiomatic expressions, it makes for a great theatrical effect and some very funny moments.
The screening of Marcel et Monsieur Pagnol in 2025 marks 70 years since the inauguration of the Palme d'Or, the festival's highest honour. In 1955 it was awarded to romantic drama Marty by Delbert Mann by that year's jury president – Pagnol.
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