State of the Arts: NOUVELLE VAGUE and BLUE MOON

It’s rare to know in the moment that you’re in the middle of an inflection point in the history of an art form. It usually just looks like creative people hanging around. How nice, then, that two new movies about such moments come to us from Richard Linklater. In movies as diverse as Slacker and Dazed and Confused and School of Rock and Boyhood he’s proven himself one of our finest observers of the dynamics of a hangout. It comes in handy in Nouvelle Vague, a movie about the 1959 making of Jean-Luc Godard’s classic debut feature Breathless, an early landmark in the French New Wave cinema of the mid-20th century. That movie is characterized by a breezy spontaneity, with a blend of pop genre shorthand with a man on the run from the law, and formal and narrative innovations like jump cuts and improvisatory location shooting. So it’s a little ironic that Linklater puts a lot of period piece effort into meticulously bringing such looseness to specific recreated life. But the movie is a warm love letter to this style and mode of filmmaking, shooting in textured black and white photography in a squared-off aspect ratio, with fuzzy French language tracks and English subtitles burned into the print in that soft analogue style. 

The story itself, gently draped over the prep, filming, and post-production of the film in question, gives us a Godard (Guillaume Marbeck) who spouts off theories of filmmaking, almost grinning from behind his sunglasses and puffs of cigarette smoke, drawing creative collaborators toward him with a oddly inscrutable charisma while befuddling the more buttoned-up financiers. He’s surrounded by a crew of fellow film critics turned filmmakers, and Linklater affectionately stuffs the frame and fills sequences with actors inhabiting all manner of bold named French film notables of the time. (Zoey Deutch and Aubry Dullin do an especially uncanny Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo.) The cast of characters universally speak in epigrammatic aphorisms, often featuring famous quotes that’ll be recognizable to anyone who has read the many volumes documenting this moment in cinema history. But this isn’t a closed-off picture for the die hards only. It has too much movie love, and a willingness to wave in newcomers and old pros alike to explore this period more. The fact that we know how this whole story turns out somehow doesn’t spoil the fun of seeing it play out. 

For all the focus on his writerly details as a screenwriter, Linklater is underrated for his director’s ability to shift his form to fit the subject. As such, it’s a continual unfolding delight to see Blue Moon feel as comfortably theatrical as Nouvelle Vague is specifically filmic. It feels effervescently like a play, even as its camera and editing takes us cleanly and cinematically through its confined space. It’s a form fitting for a movie about Broadway songwriter Lorenz Hart set entirely on Oklahoma!’s opening night in 1943. Hart was famously creatively paired with Richard Rodgers, who left him behind to work on this Okie musical with Oscar Hammerstein II. What Hart suspects this night, and which we know from the weight of history, is that Lorenz and Hart are old news, while Rodgers and Hammerstein were about to be the great new thing. The former made the kind of light, clever, cheeky patter that lent an air of elegance and mid-Atlantic sophistication to the early 20th century stage. The latter would make the big, sturdy, sweeping spectacle musicals of the mid-century. Linklater’s movie is perched perfectly on this pivot point, and has just the right person from which to view it. This is a story of the muse (perhaps literally, in the form of an ambitious co-ed played by Margaret Qualley) leaving one man, and finding companionship with another, told from the perspective of the man slowly feeling his opportunities slipping away.

Ethan Hawke plays Lorenz in a nearly nonstop monologue at the hotel bar waiting for the after party. He only pauses to take in fleeting dialogue in exchanges with characters who float in and out of his pity party. He’s flirtatious, he’s coy, he’s confessional, he’s vulgar and jealous and an overflowing font of allusions and amusements. He’s living his life like it’s a stage for soliloquizing, and those he interacts with are mere supporting parts for him to practice witticisms upon at best, mere audience for his genius at worst. And yet all this razzle-dazzle verbal dexterity is clearly compensating for deeply felt inadequacies (he's literally smaller in the frame than anyone) and other psychological ambiguities. The entrance of his former writing partner (Andrew Scott) sheds new light on their working relationship, its tensions and creativity, and we watch as one man’s neediness and the other’s kindness push and pull, two orbits briefly intersecting one last time as they’re about to diverge. Here’s the world as a stage where every man must play a part, and his a sad one. But the movie is not a mere sad-clown slice-of-biopic-life. It’s an insightful, melancholic character study buoyed along with a diegetic old school show tunes piano score and a clever, intelligent screenplay, the kind that’s studded with great punchlines that never quite puncture the melancholic core. We know that in a few months he’ll be dead and Rodgers will be better than ever. In some way, he suspects it, too.