Film reviews: Nouvelle Vague | Is This Thing On?
Richard Linklater’s take on French cinema legend Jean-Luc Godard celebrates the joy of art for art’s sake, writes Alistair Harkness
Nouvelle Vague (12A) ★★★★
Is This Thing On? (15) ★★★★
Dramatising the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s groundbreaking debut feature Breathless, Nouvelle Vague finds the prolific and mercurial Richard Linklater continuing his playful protest against the dumbing down of popular culture (see current Oscar nominee Blue Moon) by zeroing in on French cinema’s most radical iconoclast.
Named for the game-changing movement that Godard helped define, the film begins as an exploration of the French New Wave on the cusp of François Truffaut’s international triumph with The 400 Blows at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival, an event that intensifies Godard’s own fear that he’s about to be left behind as the last of the fabled Cahiers du Cinéma critics – after Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol and Éric Rohmer – to make a movie.
Here, Godard – payed with detached, movie-star cool by newcomer Guillaume Marbeck – is full of restless energy and this, combined with his shooting-from-the-hip confidence, makes him an irresistible protagonist as he corrals a group of partners-in-crime to radically reinvent cinema by throwing out the rule book. Along the way, famous Godard aphorisms are casually dispensed with off-the-cuff casualness while Breathless stars Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin) and Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch) bump up against their unorthodox director with a mixture of bafflement, bonhomie and, in the case of Seberg (already an international star), nervousness that this could wreck her career.
As infuriating as Godard no doubt was, though, Linklater – working with a French cast and crew and shooting in black-and-white as if he was on set at the time – treats the making of Breathless as the joyful pursuit of art for art’s sake. It’s a joy that infuses every frame of Nouvelle Vague.
British comedian John Bishop’s journey into stand-up proves an unlikely inspiration for Bradley Cooper’s latest film Is This Thing On?, an artful relationship comedy-drama about a middle-aged family man who finds relief from his faltering marriage by performing at open-mic nights around New York. Starring Will Arnett as Bishop proxy Alex Novak, and Laura Dern as his newly estranged wife Tess, the film is pretty funny as it revels in the machinations of the grassroots comedy scene, with Cooper – who's pretty funny himself in a supporting role as Alex's spaced-out best friend – capturing the strange intimacy of stand-up and using it to chart Alex’s gradual emergence from his emotionally catatonic state off-stage.
But as a director Cooper is also alive to the quieter moments in Alex and Tess’s relationship that demonstrate the depth of feeling and complicated emotions that can remain between couples even after they’ve split; and the performances Arnett and Dern give here capture the nuances of that ongoing entanglement in a plausibly real and pleasingly unexpected ways.
Both films in cinemas from 30 January
The Scotsman’s arts newsletter is now sent twice a week - subscribe today
Want the latest Scottish headlines sent directly to your phone? Sign up to our new WhatsApp channel here.
Comments
Want to join the conversation? Please or to comment on this article.