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NOUVELLE VAGUE

Producers: Michèle Pétin and Laurent Pétin   Director: Richard Linklater   Screenplay: Holly Gent, Vince Palmo, Michèle Halberstadt and Laetitia Masson   Cast: Guillaume Marbeck, Zoey Deutch, Aubry Dullin, Adrien Rouyard, Antoine Besson, Jodie Ruth Forest, Bruno Dreyfürst, Benjamin Clery, Matthieu Penchinat, Pauline Belle, Blaise Pettebone, Benoît Bouthors, Paolo Luka Noé, Jade Phan-Gia, Fanck Cicurel, Roxane Rivière, Jean-Jacques Le Vessier, Côme Thieulin, Laurent Mothe, Jonas Marmy, Niko Ravel, Alix Bénézech, Aurélien Lorgnier and Tom Novembre   Distributor: Netflix

Grade: B+

Like Richard Linklater’s last film—the delicious “Blue Moon”—”Nouvelle Vague” pays homage to artistic creativity.  But while the poignant but funny portrait of Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart, in the twilight of his career, focused on the stage, this one centers on Linklater’s own bailiwick, filmmaking, specifically on the triumph of Jean-Luc Godard in making his first movie, “Breathless,” in his own way.  Both films, of course, will appeal especially to niche audiences, the first to theatre buffs and the second to cineastes.  But each is incredibly attentive to detail and is so masterfully made that both should pique interest in viewers outside the niches though they might need a bit of help on the contexts.    

In some ways “Vague” is the more remarkable of the two. Directors who don’t speak English have rarely overcome the lack in making English-language movies, but though Linklater doesn’t speak French, he’s made a film that’s largely in that language (though with plenty of English sections) that seems utterly fluent.  And one that’s engaging even for those who don’t know “Breathless,” though naturally familiarity with it will enhance one’s enjoyment.  (To stream it, though, you’ll need MAX, not Netflix.)

Linklater and his collaborators cinematographer David Chambille and editor Catherine Schwartz don’t try to mimic the style of “Breathless.” Though they shoot the film in Godard’s luminously silvery black-and-white and boxy framing, they eschew the helter-skelter cutting and transitions that felt revolutionary back in 1960.  And to recreate the locations Goddard used along with the period atmosphere, they depend on scads of VFX as well as Katia Wyszkop’s production design and Pascaline Chavanne’s costumes.

What Linklater and his scripters—Holly Gent, Vince Palmo, Michèle Halberstadt and Laetitia Masson—do reflect from Godard’s film is the larky enthusiasm behind its making as a twenty-day quickie embodying both Godard’s love of the spirit behind American movies and his determination to follow his own lights in giving “Breathless” a distinctive rhythm and spontaneity.  “Nouvelle Vague,” which came to define the movement in which Godard played a major part, celebrates the unconventionality of Godard’s method but in a fashion that’s stylistically quite conventional. 

It begins with Godard (Guillaume Marbeck), a dour-looking fellow in dark glasses but with an impish, often derisive, sense of humor, bemoaning the fact that he’s behind his fellow critics at the Cahiers du Cinėma in actually making movies.  His friends Claude Chabrol (Antoine Besson) and François Truffaut (Adrian Rouyard) have already made a splash with “Le Beau Serge” and “Les quatre cents coups,” and he’s anxious to do likewise.  So he convinces producer Georges de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfürst) to bankroll a modestly-budgeted genre movie, based on a scenario by Truffaut, about a charismatic crook who goes on the run in Paris after killing a policeman and hooks up with an expatriate American girl, who will ultimately be faced with a decision whether to turn him in to the cops pursuing him.

With money in hand Goddard recruits his leads, Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin), a boxer who’d just returned from military service in Algeria, as the crook Michel, and Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch), the Otto Preminger discovery whose then-husband François Moreuil (Paolo Luka Noé) persuaded her the movie would be a good career move after “Saint Joan” and “Bonjour Tristesse,” to play Patricia, the girl who shelters him on the lam. 

It becomes clear from the first day of shooting that Goddard’s approach is unique.  He’ll make decisions on the fly—or not at all, since when he’s uninspired, or hasn’t come up with dialogue for something to shoot, he’ll simply declare things finished for the day. 

His way, at once peremptory and filled with gnomic utterances (“one is either a plagiarist or a revolutionary”) bewilders his collaborators (for while emphasizing Godard’s my-way-or-the-highway method Linklater and his also show that “Breathless” was a collaborative effort).  They respond differently, of course.  Belmondo rolls with the punches, never losing the cool for which he becomes famous, while Beauregard is apoplectic over the lack of discipline.  Seberg is so perplexed that she considers walking off the project, but Moreuil convinces her to stick it out.

Meanwhile script supervisor (Pauline Belle) is flummoxed by Godard’s making up scenes at the last moment and his lack of concern for simple continuity (“continuity is not reality”), but cameraman Raoul Coutard (Benjamin Clery) merely goes along with whatever’s demanded of him: a war photographer hired to give things a documentary feel, the gangly fellow squeezes himself and his camera into a rolling bin to surreptitiously capture a street scene that will feature passersby as unwitting extras.  Yet Godard has hired an experienced assistant in Pierre Rissient (Benjamin Clery), who proves adept in responding without qualm to his every whim.  And when it comes to the editing process, Goddard orders the staff not to cut whole scenes, but just unnecessary parts of them, which leads to that jerky rhythm for which the movie became famous.

And while the entire object is to show how what Godard was doing contributed to a movement that was thought of as “new,” the passing of the torch to a new generation of filmmakers, “Nouvelle Vague” is also intent on demonstrating that it wasn’t born ex nihilo. The script repeatedly shows how established director encouraged and advised Goddard and his contemporaries, whether it be through vigorous pep talks like one delivered by Roberto Rosselini (Laurent Mothe) during a visit to the Cahiers offices, or the mixture of complaints and suggestions given Godard by Robert Bresson (Aurélien Lorgnier) during a chance meeting in the Parisian subway where the older man is working on his film, though he’s much more concerned with continuity.  Perhaps the most engaging of these interventions comes when voluble Jean-Pierre Melville (Tom Novembre) agrees to ad-lib a scene in which he’s interviewed by Patricia in her job as a journalist.

They’re far from the only real personages who appear, however briefly, here.  One will glimpse Suzanne Schiffman (Jodie Ruth Forest), Agnès Varda (Roxane Rivière), Éric Rohmer (Côme Thieulin), Jacques Rivette (Jonas Marmy) and Juliette Greco (Alix Bénézech), among others.  But not to worry: Linklater provides their names in accompanying captions, and there’s no final quiz that requires you to remember them.  Film buffs, however, will appreciate their presence, even in a single shot.

Some will perhaps criticize “Nouvelle Vague” as an exercise in cinematic insularity, done up in a way that might be thought precious.  What rescues it is Linklater’s sincerity.  The film isn’t just a trick—it’s a genuine love-letter not to Godard’s early style (which in his later years grew increasingly heavy and pretentious) but to the liberation it proclaimed from stylistic expectations that were thought of as stale and confining.  Linklater makes his films, including this one, very differently from the way Godard made “Breathless,” but the freedom that film bestowed on later directors animated Linklater’s career, from “Slackers” onward.  In making “Nouvelle Vague” he pays tribute not only to Godard’s break with the past but his profound influence on the future, including himself.

Now Showing

WICKED: FOR GOOD

Producers: Marc Platt and David Stone   Director: Jon M. Chu   Screenplay: Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox   Cast: Cynthia Erivo, Ariana Grande, Jonathan Bailey, Ethan Slater, Bowen Yang, Marissa Bode, Michelle Yeoh, Jeff Goldblum, Bronwyn James, Sharon D. Clarke and Colman Domingo   Distributor: Universal Pictures

Grade: C-

“Second Act Trouble” is a common term in the Broadway lexicon; Steven Suskin even used it as the title of his 2006 book.  It focused on flop musicals, but successful ones have suffered from the phenomenon too, and despite its astonishing success, which has raised it to the level of a cultural icon, “Wicked” is a perfect example: even some of its most rabid devotees will admit that the second act isn’t the equal of the first.

Director John Chu apparently recognized that, and so in refashioning the hit show for the screen, he employed Dana Fox and composer Stephen Schwartz to beef up the second half of his two-picture concept by expanding the narrative to iron out the jerkiness in Winnie Holtzman’s original libretto and adding a couple of new songs, “No Place Like Home” and “The Girl in the Bubble,” to the largely unremarkable score.  The result is that “For Good,” as the completion is titled after its supposedly show-stopping closing duet, runs for well over two hours rather than the single hour of the original stage version.

But the tinkering really doesn’t mark much of an improvement; in fact, in some ways it exacerbates the weaknesses.  The plot is still jerky, with character motivations jumping back and forth so abruptly that you might suffer from whiplash trying to understand them.  The new songs are at best ordinary.  And the tone of the movie is dark and gloomy, despite the basic emphasis on the bond of sisterly friendship that can survive despite stresses and strains—the theme that has struck a chord with (especially female) audiences over the past two decades. 

By comparison to last year’s predecessor, which was brassy and eye-poppingly garish, this sequel vacillates between gaudily overdone bright sequences built around Glinda (Ariana Grande) and brooding, depressing ones centered on Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo).  The visual contrasts in Nathan Crowley’s production design, Paul Tazewell’s costumes and Alice Brooks’s cinematography are striking, but not in a good way.       

One shouldn’t blame the filmmakers too much, of course.  The fault really lies with the source material.  Novelist Gregory Maguire, on whose 1995 book the musical was based, never successfully integrated his revisionist take into L. Frank Baum’s original stories or the 1939 film based on them, and seeing his attempt turned into action merely accentuates its weaknesses.  The first half of “Wicked” on screen was mediocre; the second is equally bad, just in different ways.        

To recap: Elphaba has escaped villainous Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh), the evil power behind the weak Wizard (Jeff Goldblum).  She continues her fight on behalf of Oz’s animals and, in an escalation of discriminatory policies, the Munchkins, whose land is now governed by Elphaba’s bitter, wheelchair-bound sister Nessarose (Marissa Bode), who rigorously enforces the cruel rules despite her love for her servant Bog (Ethan Slater), a Munchkin himself. (The preachiness is as heavy-handed as in the last film.)  For her part Morrible uses fear and hatred to turn Elphaba into the Wicked Witch of the West in the public mind.

Her chief instrument in this is Glinda, the magic-free beauty who’s presented as the beacon of purity and good in contrast to her former friend Elphaba.  Glinda is also affianced to Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey), who is also now the Captain of the Wizard’s horsemen despite his residual love for Elphaba, which will become a major turning point.

Then there are the Baum characters—Dorothy, the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion—who are inserted into the plot, as well as the tornado that brings the Kansas farmgirl to Oz by Morrible’s machinations.  (One of the more ludicrous elements of Chu’s staging is always to show Dorothy without revealing her face—a tactic some films about Christ used to avoid being labeled as sacrilegious.)  The three are treated as pawns in Morrible’s schemes, and portrayed in rather nasty terms (especially the Tin Man, whose creation is presented in an especially disquieting way, though not as unsettling as the montage that depicts the formation of The Scarecrow).

The crux of the plot is how Glinda overcomes her vanity and ambition to embrace true, rather than false, goodness and embrace her old friendship with Elphaba, and how Elphaba’s dream of ending discrimination in Oz is achieved, though not without sacrifice.  That would be fine if the twists and turns of plot and character motivation weren’t so bizarrely quick (even the flying monkeys change from threat to ally in the blink of an eye) and the explanations about what transpires weren’t so ludicrous.  (That involving Elphaba’s escape from a watery death is a bit of claptrap that on stage is absurd, and on film more so.  It’s also badly shot by Chu, Brooks and effects supervisor Pablo Helman.)  And the “happy ending” for Elphaba and Fiyero in fact looks awfully bleak.  As to the great mass of Ozites, at the end they look to be the same band of grinning, colorfully dressed nonentities who do nothing all day but wait to ooh and ahh over whatever outlandish display whoever’s in power deigns to favor them with as they always were; in spite of the glitz, the Emerald City feels like a very boring place.

Of course, none of this will matter a whit to devotees of the show, who will savor every moment of this elephantine extravaganza.  And in truth there are some redeeming factors.  Erivo and Grande—particularly the latter this time around—wring everything they can out of their storied characters, and though the songs they sing are second-rate, they give them their all—which is considerable.  Goldblum brings his patented sense of whimsy to the Wizard, and his big number, “Wonderful,” has a bit of the Great White Way panache that’s sadly lacking elsewhere; it also benefits from the work of the effects team, which has also conjured up lots of CGI critters, many of the Disney-cute variety.  (Sharon D. Clarke returns to voice Dulcibear, nicely, but Colman Domingo is wasted as the Cowardly Lion.)  John Powell’s underscore is fine, and editor Myron Kerstein tries to keep things moving, if not always successfully.

But the rest of the cast offers little.  Yeoh and Bode are dull and Slater, on the other end of the spectrum, hammy.  Bailey is a blandly handsome hero (though anyone would have trouble with his character’s sudden switcheroos).  And while Bowen Yang and Bronwyn James return as Pfannee and ShenShen, now Glinda’s aides, they have so little to do that they’re in the blink-and-you’ll-miss-them category.  For a musical, the dancing is minimal, especially for the principals; and in the ensemble numbers Christopher Scott’s choreography is again busy but robotic.       

“Wicked” was a big hit, and “For Good” will doubtlessly be so as well. But one hopes that future composers and filmmakers will resist the temptation to seek inspiration from the myriad continuations Maguire has added to his first novel in what’s become a long series. That yellow brick road is not an inviting route.