Nouvelle Vague
(New Wave)
1990
Watching New Wave, it felt like a Tarkovsky film, especially Nostalghia (1983) at many places – may be because of the organic pace and camera work of the film, may be because of the very presence of Domiziana Giordano (and the horses!) or may be the hypnotizing locales of Italy, I don’t know. But the film surely echoes some of the elements of the Tarkovsky classic for Nouvelle Vague is essentially a yearning for the past and nostalgia of la dolce vita of yesteryear.
New Wave (1990)
The basic premise of the film follows a rich couple Richard and Elena, visibly dissatisfied with their lives, attempting to search for that elusive object called happiness and hence trying to discover their place on earth. They assume roles of the dominating and the dominated in turns Yet again, Godard crafts a film that works on so many levels that it becomes intensely personal in more than one way. Richard and Elena may be representing the French New Wave and traditional cinema respectively as they try to find their own place and struggle to accept their mutual existence. So the film on one level becomes a superficial study of how the New Wave affected established cinema and vice-versa. With characters named de Sica, Mankiewicz and Aldrich, this argument seems plausible, but one shouldn’t restrict the film to a mere interpretational exercise, again a Tarkovskian trait of the film.
The regular intertitles read “Things, not words” and this is exactly what the film seems to be following. Godard bids adieu to his immensely talkative pair of periods, for the events around the world have made words completely futile. He places the images in the driver’s seat such that the basic feel of the film prompts one to classify it as elegiac. Coming soon after the twin collapse of East Germany and the USSR, Nouvelle Vague will be remembered as a befitting farewell to the most revolutionary ideology in the annals of mankind and the most subversive period of filmmaking in cinema history.
The Seventh Art 
December 26, 2008 at 9:02 pm
Nice write-up of a great film. The script for this film is quite unusual, in that it is composed almost entirely of quotes from other sources, collaged together in unusual ways. Thus the gardener’s recurring question about the dead bee comes from Howard Hawks’ To Have and Have Not, and there are quotes from Chandler’s The Long Goodbye alongside more philosophical texts. This does have the effect of turning all this compulsive quotation into mere background chatter, so that the plot and ideas of the film cannot be determined at all from the dialogue: you have to watch. There has never been a film with so many words that mean so little. In many ways, the film is an experiment in how narrative functions when the dialogue is essentially gibberish. Surprisingly, Godard proves that narrative is relatively resilient, and that it will shine through, in fragmentary form at least, even through the densest obstructions. Of course, Godard had long proved, in feature after feature, that he could subject narrative to truly radical distortions and ellipses without eliminating it entirely. Indeed, there are only a few films, like 2 or 3 Things, where narrative is almost entirely absent in Godard’s work.
Nouvelle Vague is also, in its structure, possibly an oblique tribute to Vertigo, with the roles reversed as the man is the one who dies and is then restored in a subtly different guise.
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December 26, 2008 at 9:11 pm
Aah, the Vertigo one is a revelation. One of Godard’s all time favorites I guess.
And coming to think of it, even the (lack of) acting doesn’t bother the narration. Its fascinating to see how Godard snaps out of the talky mode film by film and studies the nature of images. Thanks for the fodder for thought Ed.
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