It is ironic that Richard Linklater has chosen to homage a film carved out of spontaneous new techniques with one so mired in contrivances that it is impossible for it to breathe. To be fair, Breathless is the name of the game in this black-and-white reconstruction of the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s first film.
The year is 1959 and Cahiers du Cinema critic JLG is aware that he is amongst the only of his contemporaries not to have made a feature film. Claude Chabrol has. Éric Rohmer has. François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows is about to première at Cannes. JLG wants to make a non-traditional film out of natural emotions and essential moments, meaning that he refuses to give actors a full script and, later, pioneers the jump-cut. There is hysterical resistance from his financier at every turn while his movie star, Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch), is only prevented from pulling out by her manager husband. As we know, JLG was unflappably confident and Linklater arms him with an arsenal of bon mots that he deploys to silence objections. Guillaume Marbeck does an entertaining impersonation of the famous auteur, permanently sporting dark glasses and a nonchalant drone of a voice.
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There are limited larks to be found in the ‘getting the band together’ procedural elements. A gimmicky approach to introducing all creatures great and small loses its charm faster than you can say “girl and a gun”. Fresh from Otto Preminger’s Bonjour Tristesse, Seberg is famous and sceptical. Untested boxer, Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin) is fresh and game. MVP is Matthieu Penchinat as DoP Raoul Coutard. Asked in reference to a specific shot composition if he has seen Ingmar Bergman’s Summer Interlude he replies with total sincerity, “No, I was in Vietnam.” Linklater is aware of the absurdity of making cinema your religion when there’s a world of pain out there, and yet in this parish it is a truth we hold to be self-evident.
This is a rare moment where the world beyond the production of Breathless is acknowledged and it stands out, not because movies about movie-making are inherently limited (see Fassbinder’s wonderful Beware of a Holy Whore and indeed – sorry to JLG – Truffaut’s Day For Night). The problem with making it the axis here is that the ‘will they won’t they pull this off?’ central tension is a moot point. There are no stakes because the destiny of Breathless is a foregone conclusion. So enjoyment here rests entirely upon how much you enjoy historical reenactments.
Full of inside cinema jokes while, on the flip side, offering a film history 101 class, Linklater has not worked through the contradictions in his approach. He pitches provocations to cinephiles (short films don’t count as films apparently!) while undertaking a doomed effort to charge the enterprise with tension. A Bout de Soufflé is a canonical classic anointed as changing the course of cinema, a fact that drains all mystery out of JLG’s position within this story as a young, untested upstart.