Nouvelle Vague – Richard Linklater bends the knee to Breathless and Jean-Luc Godard

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Linklater recreates the making of the landmark French New Wave classic with an awestruck tastefulness that smooths over any disruptiveness Breathless, deathless … and pointless? Here is Richard Linklater’s impeccably submissive, tastefully cinephile period drama about the making of Godard’s debut 1960 classic À Bout de Souffle, that starred Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo as the star-crossed lovers in Paris. Linklater’s homage has credits in French and is beautifully shot in monochrome, as opposed to the boring old colour of real life in which the events were actually happening; he even cutely fabricates cue marks in the corner of the screen, those things that once told projectionists when to changeover the reels. But Linklater smoothly avoids any disruptive jump-cuts. It’s a good natured, intelligent effort for which Godard himself, were he still alive, would undoubtedly have ripped Linklater a new one. (When Michel Hazanavicius made Redoubtable in 2017 about Godard’s making of ...
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Le Film de Mon Père review – father’s videotape legacy sparks intergenerational dialogue

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A Swiss film-maker’s parent leaves behind a visual diary that raises questions about the limitations of art in a fascinating documentary debut

The genesis of Jules Guarneri’s documentary – his first – comes from an unusual gift. Having made more than 20 hours of a filmed diary, his father, Jean, entrusted the material to the budding director, hoping that it would form the building blocks for his son’s first feature. These visual journals, in which the older man addresses the camera – and ultimately Guarneri – with recollections from his past, are awash with nostalgia and regret. As Jean’s recordings are interspersed with Guarneri’s own footage of his family, what starts out as a monologue gradually transforms into an intergenerational dialogue between father and son.

Filmed with a fixed camera, Jean’s diaries have a static quality that echoes the stagnancy of his life story. Christabel, his wife and Guarneri’s mother, was an heiress, and the couple lived as idle rich in the Swiss village of Villars. Jean’s recordings are haunted by his inability to fulfil his artistic pursuits, and he urges Guarneri to follow through on his projects. This environment of inertia, however, is infectious: Iwa and Oskar, Guarneri’s adopted siblings from Colombia, live on the same estate as their father, albeit in two separate chalets. Even though Christabel has long since died, it seems impossible for the children to cut the umbilical cord and strike out on their own.

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