Nouvelle Vague | |
---|---|
Directed by | Jean-Luc Godard |
Written by | Jean-Luc Godard |
Produced by | Alain Sarde |
Starring | Alain Delon Domiziana Giordano Jacque Dacqmine Christophe Odent |
Cinematography | William Lubtchansky |
Edited by | Jean-Luc Godard (uncredited) [1] |
Distributed by | Mercury Film Group |
Release date | May 23, 1990 (France) |
Running time | 90 minutes |
Countries | France Switzerland |
Language | French |
Box office | 140,356 admissions (France) [2] |
Nouvelle Vague (English: New Wave) is a 1990 French film written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard. It follows the story of hitchhiker Lennox (Alain Delon) credited as Lui (He), taken in by a wealthy industrialist, Elena Torlato-Favrini or Elle (She), played by Domiziana Giordano. The film was entered into the 1990 Cannes Film Festival. [3] It has (as of 2019) never been released on any home video format in North America, but the audio was issued as a 2CD set by ECM.
La Contessa Elena Torlato-Favrini (her last name taken from The Barefoot Contessa ) is a wealthy Italian industrialist living in a sprawling estate near Lake Geneva, Switzerland. She is attended by Jules the Gardener, his wife Yvonne, their daughter Cécile, the chauffeur Laurent, and the mysterious Della La Rue (or Della Street), a reference to Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason stories). At the film's opening, Elena goes for a drive by herself and encounters Roger Lennox (his last name taken from The Long Goodbye ), an apparent drifter. Elena's trajectory is brought to an abrupt halt as she stops to help Roger, who has evidently been forced off the road by a truck and is severely incapacitated. Roger offers Elena his hand, and Elena accepts his offer (the "miracle of empty hands" borrowed from Diary of a Country Priest ). The series of exchanges constituting their relationship begins.
The narrative continues with Roger now Elena's kept man. He dotes on her and is obedient to her retinue that includes Elena's lawyer Raoul Dorfman, Raoul's girlfriend, the Doctor (one of Elena's shareholders) and the Doctor's wife Dorothy Parker, a writer like her namesake. After a series of episodes in which both members of the couple express dissatisfaction with the other and together ruminate on regret, Elena decides to take a motorboat across the lake to visit some friends. Roger obediently drives the boat and stops when Elena wants to get in the water, but refuses to join her, citing his inability to swim. In a mishap evocative of their first meeting, Roger falls into the water as Elena gets back into the boat. Elena watches him drown and does not help, appearing indifferent to his plight.
The servants and Raoul quickly attempt to cover up any existence of Roger but almost immediately there is a new crisis: a man identical to Roger, calling himself Richard Lennox and claiming to be Roger's brother, appears. He claims to know about the boating incident and is apparently using that as leverage to take over one of Elena's companies. While before the figure of Lennox was passive and docile, he is now shrewd and aggressive; it is Elena that now becomes pliant.
The power struggle reaches a climax in a recapitulation of the boating scene. Now it is Lennox who decides to take the boat out (this time a rowboat) and it is Elena who falls into the water, apparently unable to swim. Richard, at first as indifferent to Elena as she was to Roger Lennox in the same situation, abruptly takes Elena's hand and saves her. In the end, an equilibrium is reached. Elena realizes that Richard Lennox is the same man as Roger Lennox ("the same, but different"). Richard has taken on a controlling role in Elena's affairs, but Elena remains in charge. With renewed vigor, Elena warmly bids arrivederci to her servants (Richard having earlier arranged to sell the estate for a large sum of money) and Elena and Richard in turn drive away, apparently off to have more adventures as equals. [4]
Most of the dialogue in the film consists of quotations from various sources, mostly literary. [5] The chauffeur periodically asks the Lennox character "was you ever bit by a dead bee?" – a reference to the Bogart and Bacall film To Have and Have Not . Though Godard's previous films had been peppered with quotation and allusion, this is his first film where the dialogue is almost entirely quotation, a practice that he has continued in films such as Film Socialisme and Adieu au Langage . This is also the first film of many in which Godard takes the soundtrack music from the catalogue of ECM Records, whereas in the 80's he made extensive use of classical music. ECM has in turn released a complete soundtrack to the film from beginning to end, including the film's music, dialogue, and ambient sounds.
Godard has said that the film is an allegory of the history of film.[ citation needed ] Elena represents the film industry. In the first half Lennox represents film and its makers that are taken in hand by the industry and nurtured but allowed to perish, or almost perish. Film is reborn in the figure of the French New Wave ("La Nouvelle Vague"), the filmmakers of which arrived armed with knowledge of the history of film but shrewd enough to manipulate the industry for their own ends, thus saving the industry from its own demise. Godard scholars like David Sterritt, Kaja Silverman, and Harun Farocki have identified other themes in the film.[ citation needed ]
Vincent Canby, writing in a contemporaneous review in The New York Times , damned the film as little more than a "feature-length lipstick commercial," concluding that "only people who despise the great Godard films ... could be anything but saddened by this one." The reviewer's final pronouncement in a review that sealed the film's lack of success in the United States was "the party's over," apparently washing his hands of Godard's career as well as the film. However, the film was championed elsewhere and was hailed as one of the very best films of the year by such critics as J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum . Canby's opinion has been disputed by later critics and scholars as well. In his book The Films of Jean-Luc Godard: Seeing the Invisible, David Sterritt devotes an entire chapter to the film, calling it a "complicated work" that has "especially strong links to Hail Mary and the other 'sublime' movies." Kaja Silverman and Harun Farocki likewise devote an entire chapter to the film in their Speaking About Godard. Based on 6 reviews, Nouvelle Vague has an approval rating of 67% on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. [6]
Jean-Luc Godard was a Franco-Swiss film director, screenwriter, and film critic. He rose to prominence as a pioneer of the French New Wave film movement of the 1960s, alongside such filmmakers as François Truffaut, Agnès Varda, Éric Rohmer and Jacques Demy. He was arguably the most influential French filmmaker of the post-war era. According to AllMovie, his work "revolutionized the motion picture form" through its experimentation with narrative, continuity, sound, and camerawork. His most acclaimed films include Breathless (1960), Vivre sa vie (1962), Contempt (1963), Band of Outsiders (1964), Alphaville (1965), Pierrot le Fou (1965), Masculin Féminin (1966), Weekend (1967) and Goodbye to Language (2014).
Kaja Silverman is an American art historian and critical theorist. She is currently the Katherine and Keith L. Sachs Professor of Art History at the University of Pennsylvania. She received B.A. and M.A. degrees in English from the University of California Santa Barbara and a Ph.D. in English from Brown University. Thereafter, she taught at Yale University, Trinity College, Simon Fraser University, Brown University, the University of Rochester and for many years was the Class of 1940 Professor in the Rhetoric Department at the University of California, Berkeley. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008, and is currently the holder of an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award.
Anna Karina was a Danish-French film actress, director, writer, model, and singer. She was French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard's early collaborator, performing in several of his films, including The Little Soldier (1960), A Woman Is a Woman (1961), My Life to Live (1962), Bande à part, Pierrot le Fou (1965), and Alphaville (1965). For her performance in A Woman Is a Woman, Karina won the Silver Bear Award for Best Actress at the Berlin Film Festival.
Breathless is a 1960 French New Wave crime drama film written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard. It stars Jean-Paul Belmondo as a wandering criminal named Michel, and Jean Seberg as his American girlfriend Patricia. The film was Godard's first feature-length work and represented Belmondo's breakthrough as an actor.
Bande à part is a 1964 French New Wave film directed by Jean-Luc Godard. It was released as Band of Outsiders in North America; its French title derives from the phrase faire bande à part, which means "to do something apart from the group". The film is about three people who commit a robbery. It received positive critical reviews, and its dance scene has been referenced several times in popular culture.
Contempt is a 1963 French New Wave drama film written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard, based on the 1954 Italian novel Il disprezzo by Alberto Moravia. It stars Brigitte Bardot, Michel Piccoli, Jack Palance, Fritz Lang, and Giorgia Moll.
Vivre sa vie is a 1962 French New Wave drama film written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard. The film was released in the United States as My Life to Live and in the United Kingdom as It's My Life.
Raoul Coutard was a French cinematographer. He is best known for his connection with the French New Wave period and particularly for his work with director Jean-Luc Godard, which includes Breathless (1960), A Woman Is a Woman (1961), Vivre sa vie (1962), Bande à part (1964), Alphaville, Pierrot le Fou, and Weekend (1967). Coutard also shot films for New Wave director François Truffaut—including Shoot the Piano Player (1960) and Jules and Jim (1962)—as well as Jacques Demy, a contemporary frequently associated with the movement.
In Praise of Love is a 2001 French film written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard. The black-and-white and color drama was shot by Julien Hirsch and Christophe Pollock. Godard has famously stated that "a film should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order." This aphorism is illustrated by In Praise of Love, which reverses the order of past and present. It was selected as the Swiss entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 74th Academy Awards, but it was not nominated.
Aria is a 1987 British anthology film produced by Don Boyd that consists of ten short films by ten different directors, each showing the director's choice of visual accompaniment to one or more operatic arias. There is little or no dialogue from the actors, with most words coming from the libretto of the operas in Italian, French, or German.
Jean-Claude Brialy was a French actor and film director.
Every Man for Himself is a 1980 drama film directed, co-written and co-produced by Jean-Luc Godard that is set in and was filmed in Switzerland. It stars Jacques Dutronc, Isabelle Huppert, and Nathalie Baye, with a score by Gabriel Yared. Nathalie Baye won the César Award for Best Supporting Actress. It also was submitted as the Swiss entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 53rd Academy Awards, but was not accepted as a nominee.
Domiziana Giordano is an Italian artist, actress, photographer, and video artist. Giordano has played roles in work directed by Mauro Bolognini, Jean-Luc Godard, Neil Jordan, Ken McMullen, Nicolas Roeg, and Andrei Tarkovsky, amongst others.
Number Two, by Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, is a 1975 experimental film about a young family in a social housing complex in France. The film's distinct style involves presenting two images on screen simultaneously, leading to multiple interpretations of the story and to comments on the film-making and editing process.
King Lear is a 1987 film directed by Jean-Luc Godard, an adaptation of William Shakespeare's play in the style of experimental French New Wave cinema. The script was primarily by Peter Sellars and Tom Luddy. It is not a typical cinematic adaptation of Shakespeare's eponymous tragedy, although some lines from the play are used in the film. Only three characters – Lear, Cordelia and Edgar – are common to both, and only Act I, scene 1 is given a conventional cinematic treatment in that two or three people actually engage in relatively meaningful dialogue.
Passion is a 1982 film by Jean-Luc Godard, the second full-length film made during his return to relatively mainstream filmmaking in the 1980s.
Histoire(s) du cinéma is an eight-part video project begun by Jean-Luc Godard in the late 1980s and completed in 1998. The longest, at 266 minutes, and one of the most complex of Godard's films, Histoire(s) du cinéma is an examination of the history of the concept of cinema and how it relates to the 20th century; in this sense, it can also be considered a critique of the 20th century and how it perceives itself. The project is widely considered Godard's magnum opus.
The Centre pour l'Image Contemporaine or CIC was a contemporary art exhibition centre in Geneva, Switzerland. CIC was established in 1985 to organize events and exhibitions of images using new technologies such as video, multimedia, and the Internet, as well as more traditional photography and film. It was also named Saint-Gervais Genève between 1985 and 2008 when including several departments: Electronic media, Exhibitions, Theatre. Its existence goes from 1985 to 2008.
Freddy Buache was a Swiss journalist, cinema critic and film historian. He was the director of the Swiss Film Archive from 1951 to 1996. He was a privatdozent at the University of Lausanne.
Goodbye to Language is a 2014 French-Swiss narrative essay film written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard. It stars Héloïse Godet, Kamel Abdeli, Richard Chevallier, Zoé Bruneau, Jessica Erickson and Christian Grégori and was shot by cinematographer Fabrice Aragno. It is Godard's 42nd feature film and 121st film or video project. In the French-speaking parts of Switzerland where it was shot, the word "adieu" can mean both goodbye and hello. The film depicts a couple having an affair. The woman's husband discovers the affair and the lover is killed. Two pairs of actors portray the couple and their actions repeat and mirror one another. Godard's own dog Roxy Miéville has a prominent role in the film and won a prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Like many of Godard's films, it includes numerous quotes and references to previous artistic, philosophical and scientific works, most prominently those of Jacques Ellul, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Mary Shelley.