Latest news with #Godard
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Netflix Buys Richard Linklater's ‘Nouvelle Vague' After Cannes Debut
Netflix has acquired Richard Linklater's Nouvelle Vague, a black-and-white love letter to the French New Wave, specifically to the 1960 classic Breathless. The sale comes after the film's strong debut at the Cannes Film Festival, where it received a 10-minute-plus standing ovation from the audience. 'If you do it long enough, I always thought you can make one film about making films. This is mine,' the filmmaker said at the Cannes press conference for Nouvelle Vague. More from The Hollywood Reporter 'Deported' Comic Russell Peters Doesn't Fear Being Sent Home Under Trump: "They'd Be Damn Foolish to Get Rid of Me" Unpacking That Unexpected 'Sirens' Ending With Meghann Fahy and Milly Alcock How 'The Tylenol Murders' Landed the Suspected Tylenol Murderer for Netflix Docuseries Nouvelle Vague tells the story of the making of Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, which follows Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a small-time criminal on the run after killing a policeman, and his romantic entanglement with Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg), an American journalism student in Paris. Linklater's French-language movie is shot on film in the 4:3 aspect ratio and stars Guillaume Marbeck as Godard, Zoey Deutch as Godard's star Jean Seberg and Aubry Dullin as Jean-Paul Belmondo. THR film critic Jordan Mintzer wrote in his review, 'It's an impressive package that certainly required more money and manpower than Godard's first feature did, while ironically enough, the moral of this movie is that a big budget and crew aren't needed to make something great. Linklater celebrates JLG's audacity even if he's directed something more conventional (although much to his credit, he directed it almost entirely in French). If Nouvelle Vague is not exactly Breathless, it's a loving homage to the crazy way Breathless was made — back when you could shoot movies fast, cheap and out of control, and somehow change cinema in the process.' Scott Feinberg, THR's executive editor of awards, also predicts that Nouvelle Vague is one of the strongest titles coming out of Cannes in the Oscar conversation. Linklater has previously been nominated for five Academy Awards. Nouvelle Vague will likely not receive a longer theatrical run in the U.S., just the standard awards-qualifying two-week window domestically, a source tells THR. Deadline was first to report the news of the sale. Best of The Hollywood Reporter 13 of Tom Cruise's Most Jaw-Dropping Stunts Hollywood Stars Who Are One Award Away From an EGOT 'The Goonies' Cast, Then and Now
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Richard Linklater's ‘Nouvelle Vague' Draws Raft Of International Buyers For Goodfellas
EXCLUSIVE: Richard Linklater's love letter to the New Wave Nouvelle Vague has sold to more than 20 theatrical distributors worldwide for Goodfellas following its buzzy Cannes premiere, as one of four French majority productions in Competition this year. They join Paris-based distributor ARP Sélection which will release the film in cinemas in France on October 8 on 500 screens, having produced the film under the banner of ARP Production with Linklater's Austin-based Detour Film. More from Deadline Zoey Deutch Felt Jean Seberg's Spirit Helped On The Set Of Richard Linklater's 'Nouvelle Vague': It Was 'A Wild Story' – Cannes Studio Doc Talk In Cannes: Deadline Podcast Hosts American Pavilion Panel On Challenged State Of Documentary Industry Sony Pictures Classics Takes North America & Multiple Territories For Cannes Caméra D'Or Winner 'The President's Cake' The French-language production about the making of Jean-Luc Godard's 1960s New Wave classic Breathless has sold out in Europe for Paris-based sales company Goodfellas. It has unveiled deals to Benelux (Cherry Pickers), the UK & Ireland (Altitude), Switzerland (Filmcoopi), Germany, (Plaion), Spain (Elastica Films), Greece (Cinobo), Italy (Lucky Red /Bim), Portugal (Alambique), Scandinavia (TriArt Film), Ex-Yugoslavia (MCF Megacom), Romania (Independenta), Baltics (Scanorama) and CIS (MJM Group). In the rest of the world, it has been acquired for Latin America (Cine Canibal), Japan (Nikkatsu Corporation/AMG), Australia (Transmission Films), South Korea (AUD), and Indonesia (Falcon Pictures). Canada, China and Asia are among territories currently under negotiation. Goodfellas says all the distributors are planning theatrical releases for the film. Nouvelle Vague, which is Linklater's first French-language film, received the support of France's National Cinema Centre (CNC), Ciné+OCS and Canal+. ARP's Michèle Halberstadt, who is a producer and co-writer on the film, and Goodfellas will submit Nouvelle Vague as a candidate to be France's Best International Feature Film entry for the 2026 Oscars. The selection process takes place in the fall. The international deals announcement follows news that Netflix has acquired U.S. rights for the film, where it will receive an awards-qualifying theatrical run and have support through the fall season. Nouvelle Vague reconstructs Godard's chaotic, improvised, hand-held shoot of Breathless on the streets of Paris over the summer of 1959. Shot in black and white and with a 4:3 aspect ratio, it stars Guillaume Marbeck as Godard, Zoey Deutch as Jean Seberg, Aubry Dullin as Jean-Paul Belmondo with other New Wave figures making appearances including François Truffaut (Adrien Rouyard), Claude Chabrol (Antoine Besson) and Raoul Coutard (Matthieu Penchinat). The film enjoyed an 11-minute ovation in Cannes and strong reviews, with Deadline critic Pete Hammond writing of the film: 'Linklater's splendid love letter to the French New Wave and Godard will make you fall in love with movies all over again.' Best of Deadline 'Hacks' Season 4 Release Schedule: When Do New Episodes Come Out? Everything We Know About 'Hacks' Season 4 So Far 'The Last Of Us': Differences Between HBO Series & Video Game Across Seasons 1 And 2
New European
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- New European
Richard Linklater and the new wave of new wave
This isn't a documentary, but a drama that recreates the Paris of 1959, the streets and the cars and the cafes and the clothes, all shot in black and white, just like the masterpiece of iconoclastic indie film-making itself, the one that defined the new wave of this film's title. Sometimes, it's like they make the movies just for you. Who else would possibly enjoy this? I wondered, as I sat there in Cannes' main temple of cinema, the Grand Theatre Lumiere, dedicated to those founding brothers of the movies, Auguste and Louis Lumiere, watching a film all about the making of another film, the one that practically reinvented cinema: Jean-Luc Godard's À bout de souffle. Directed by American indie stalwart Richard Linklater and shot entirely in French, Nouvelle Vague could come across as indulgent and niche. I hope so. The more indulgent, the nichier the better, say I. But if you love French cinema and love Paris and love À bout de souffle (and let's face it, if you do the two former, it's probably due to the brilliance of the latter), then you'll love Nouvelle Vague. I settled into my seat and realised I was in the sweet spot of my happy place. If you don't know the many stories behind À bout de souffle, Linklater's effortlessly amiable film will fill you in. He describes it as: 'The story of Godard making À bout de souffle, told in the style and spirit in which Godard made À bout de souffle.' So there must be some licence taken even if I think everything here is true, or at least it feels that way – which, as Godard himself might say, is all you need for a movie. Using mostly unknown French actors, Linklater introduces us to the main instigators of this zeitgeisty mid-century moment, including François Truffaut (Adrien Rouyard), Claude Chabrol (Antoine Besson), Éric Rohmer (Côme Thieulin) and JLG himself (a superbly accurate Guillaume Marbeck, swathed in cigarette smoke and dark glasses) as well as actors Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin) and Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch, fabulous). Then there are what one might term the lesser-known creatives such as cinematographer Raoul Coutard (Matthieu Penchinat) and stills photographer Raymond Cauchetier (Franck Cicurel), whose images were equally instrumental in defining the era. So, yes, it's a sort of faux documentary at times: whenever the characters are introduced on screen, they pause for a couple of seconds and stare at the camera in a composed tableau, as if posing for an old-fashioned still photograph, while their names come up on the screen. There's a whiff of Wes Anderson whimsy here, but the film is nothing like Anderson's archly American The French Dispatch. Linklater is immersed in the moment, in the spirit of '59, the better to make us feel the fun of it all, the breezy joie de vivre that's still instantly conjured up whenever you think of À bout de souffle. So the film takes us through the agonies of Godard's jealousy watching his fellow film critics at Cahiers du Cinéma make their film debuts, and his conversations with producer Georges de Beauregard before he launches into the 20-day shoot of À bout de souffle, writing by hand the day's pages in a cafe every morning (there was never a script), ending the day's filming when he's run out of ideas, making it up on the spot, smoking, smoking, smoking, and cutting, cutting, cutting. But, under Linklater's worshipful gaze, it all feels like the biggest, boldest adventure, illuminated by the playful machismo of Jean-Paul Belmondo and the stylish beauty of Jean Seberg's gamine star quality. Linklater re-creates famous lines and scenes from the film, but shoots them from a reverse angle, from Godard and the camera's point of view, thus throwing new light on images we might have seen many times before, now appearing as fresh as they day they were printed. There are oodles of cinephilic in-jokes, too, including cameos from contemporary luminaries Roberto Rossellini (Laurent Mothe), Jean-Pierre Melville (Tom Novembre), Robert Bresson (Aurelien Lorgnier), who was making Pickpocket at the time, Jean Cocteau (Jean-Jacques Le Messier) and Juliette Gréco (Alix Benezech). There are quips and quotes, there are delicious movie-making moments capturing how Godard directed his actors and how they moved to his strict instructions. You don't have to be an expert in French cinema to love this, though it probably helps. I am, unashamedly, so I don't know or care, which is why I say I felt like they were making it just for me. Maybe that (Cannes-do?) spirit of self-starting and rule-breaking appealed to me because, as some of you might know, I'm about to make my first movie as a producer (A Waiter in Paris, based on the memoir by Edward Chisholm), due to be shot partly on the streets of Paris, on a film partly inspired by all this nouvelle vague coolness. The first night I arrived in Paris to live for a year, as a language assistant in 1991, I went to watch À bout de souffle, for the very first time. My life changed that night, or at least shifted into a different gear. I fell in love, with Paris and with movies. So now, watching Godard, his crew and his contemporaries take to the streets in their various contraptions – shopping carts and wheelchairs adapted to get their handheld shots and sense of movement – it rang out again, pushing me into another new gear with what felt like a challenge and a validation, that every now and then cinema can and must be reinvented, injected with fresh visions and personality, the prevailing order given a right run for its money until it is literally out of breath. And that I can do this, go from critic to film-maker. I'm not directing my movies and, somewhat worryingly, the only guy that looks a bit exasperated in Nouvelle Vague, is the producer character, George de Beauregard, forever fretting that no one's shooting, or that there's no script, to the point that he and Godard come to blows and a full-on grapple match on a cafe floor. Is that what I'm signing up for? Worth it for the creation of a classic, I'd say – plus Beauregard went on to produce Cléo de 5 à 7, Une femme est une femme, Le Mépris, Pierrot le fou… I'd take that, if it means I have to roll with the punches. Then there's all the music Linklater uses, not just some of the famous Martial Solal soundtrack to Breathless, but also other jazz and French sounds of the time, such as Sacha Distel, Dalida and I'm sure I heard Michel Legrand's work with Miles Davis from Legrand Jazz, which came out in 1958… then again, I always hear Miles Davis's trumpet when I see Paris on screen, whether it's there or not. And a word, too, for Deutch, the only American actor here (she previously starred in Linklater's campus film Everybody Wants Some from 2016), playing Jean Seberg and capturing all her American-accented French so perfectly, as well as her haircut and her walk, that jaunt up the Champs-Élysées shouting 'New York Herald Tribune,' all her style, dressed in Chanel and exuding the magical, diva quality that made producer Beauregard fork out half the budget on hiring her (see, producer's instincts are everything). I don't usually focus on one film from Cannes, but Nouvelle Vague, playing in Competition, struck me as something special, something new. I didn't catch them all, this year. For the last 25 years or so, I've seen all the Competition films, fearful that I might miss the Palme d'Or winner, but with producing duties taking over this year, I had to do meetings with financiers, listen to co-production and tax credit panels and sit down with sales agents, very important people at Cannes, no doubt. But as Nouvelle Vague shows, when the history of cinema is told, when they recount the legends of making movies to pass on the baton to a new generation, such as Linklater does here, on screen there are critics, costumiers, cinematographers, actors, writers, script editors, the assistant director. There's a producer and, briefly, the marketing guy. But there are no sales agents or financiers. One might wonder where all this ancestor worship fits in Linklater's own ever-growing and mutating oeuvre. Now 64, he's always been a flag bearer for indie film, since his loose-limbed breakthrough Slacker helped define the golden era of '90s American movie making, compounded by Dazed and Confused and the rather brilliant Before trilogy, starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy across the years, with my favourite being the achingly romantic Before Sunset, taking place in Paris. But he's also had the big hit of School of Rock, as well experimental animation work, and the mighty yet subtle achievement of Boyhood, spanning decades. He ticks off the styles and the stats with a Godardian appetite, reflecting on the passing of time (his films can take place in a day, or over long periods), ambition (or lack of it) among young people, and the act of artistic creation. His films are often about just hanging out with a bunch of characters, so Nouvelle Vague is right up his boulevard I'd say, as if he's actually totally disappeared into À bout de souffle while showing it at one of his famous Austin Film Society nights, like the characters in Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo. (Allen himself recently fulfilled a dream of making a film entirely in French, Coup de Chance, though it may prove his last). Nouvelle Vague is a 'hang out' movie, a chance to transport yourself to a Cahiers editorial meeting, or to the Cinematheque, to a new wave film set, and to the cafes and streets of 1959 Paris, to smoke and drink coffee, to be reminded of youthful arrogance, even if these tweedy French intellos do look a bit like university professors than punk-like rebels. Let's remember that film critics can become great film-makers, because we all love movies after all. Let's keep cinema sexy and daring, it says, let's aim high to match the best. Let's remember what Godard said: 'You don't make a film, the film makes you.' And let's ride that wave.
Yahoo
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Nouvelle Vague' Review: Richard Linklater's French New Wave Cosplay Is More ‘Midnight in Paris' Than Histoire du Cinema
From Jean Seberg's sideswept pixie cut to Jean-Paul Belmondo's aviators, Jean-Luc Godard's 'Breathless' has become more fashionable in today's cultural imagination for its iconic looks and images than for how the jump-cut-pioneering renegade feature collapsed cinematic hierarchies as we knew them in 1960. That makes one of the greatest films of all time, and the standard bearer of the French New Wave, ripe for discovery for a younger generation — and fresher still for the older ones well familiar with it. If the best way to criticize a movie, as Cahiers du Cinéma critic Godard once said, is to make one, then director Richard Linklater's answer to making a tribute to 'Breathless' might instead be to not quite criticize but certainly to subvert the tropes of movies about moviemaking. His black-and-white 'Nouvelle Vague,' itself a meticulous recreation of a movie made in 1959 with all the celluloid, Academy-ratio crackle and pop, is more New Wave hangout movie than cinema history, with the parade of faces and names inspiring knowing chuckles in the cinephile audience. More from IndieWire 'Imago' Review: Chechen Documentary Explores a Filmmaker's Conflicted Return to His Roots 'Zootopia 2' Trailer: The Disney Sequel Introduces Reptiles with Ke Huy Quan's Mysterious Snake Beyond Godard, appearances from Claude Chabrol, François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Robert Bresson, Agnès Varda, and more figureheads — all played by lesser-known actors with varying likeness to their real-life counterparts — make for a veritable who's-who soufflé more akin to Woody Allen's 'Midnight in Paris' fin-de-siècle cosplay, where run-and-gun appearances by literary and artistic idols like Salvador Dalí, Gertrude Stein, Alice Toklas, Man Ray, Luis Buñuel, and Djuna Barnes provided little more than window-dressing to a Belle Époque time travel exercise. 'Nouvelle Vague' is deeper than that, though a lot of these namedrops exist without context beyond 'look, here they are.' It's greatly amusing to play a kind of 'I Spy' game in 'Nouvelle Vague' as to who's who in the ensemble — though the filmmakers take the guessing out with name cards that introduce each character as if in a Wes Anderson or, perhaps, a Godard movie that inspired someone like Anderson. But 'Nouvelle Vague,' perhaps by design, fails to make the case that 'Breathless' was a groundbreaking endeavor at all. That's perhaps because the on-the-ground, glue-and-paper-clips late-1950s crew at the time (besides maybe except Godard himself) didn't know what they had their hands on or what shape it would take. Godard's revolutionary crime drama about a guy, a girl, and a gun comes off more like a pet project or even a student film here, part of both the charms and frustrations of 'Nouvelle Vague.' Perpetually in dark sunglasses, newcomer Guillaume Marbeck plays Godard as little more than a caricature of the man who lagged behind his Cahiers du Cinéma peers (Rivette and Éric Rohmer among them) in terms of taking his cinephilia beyond the storied magazine and in front of a movie camera. But Marbeck cuts a rueful silhouette, a cigarette ever burnt to its nub in his hands, that could easily inspire some Instagram-friendly looks if 'Nouvelle Vague' finds the right audience (and I think a young one is ultimately what Linklater is after, here). Well-cast is Zoey Deutch as 'Breathless' breakout Jean Seberg in her nascent prime, who made the film two decades before she succumbed to mental illness and likely killed herself after becoming an FBI target for her political views (though her death remains the subject of mystery and speculation, in places like the podcast 'You Must Remember This,' which offers an addictive season paralleling the careers of Seberg and Jane Fonda as Hollywood political outcasts). There's little foreshadowing of the Seberg that would be, though when she's not twirling in fountains in an A-line dress here, Deutch wryly plays Seberg as a kind of mischievous backstage drama queen, complaining about the amateur production and its lack of sync sound to her disaffected husband, the filmmaker François Moreuil (Paolo Luka-Noé) — her first of a few toxic husbands. Seberg was mostly fluent in French, though Deutch (who maybe isn't) warmly captures the actress' charmingly terrible American accent — and even nails the intonation of 'New York Herald Tribune!' There's also reference to her fraught collaboration with Otto Preminger — he burned her at the stake quite literally for 'Saint Joan' (1957) and challenged her on the set of her coming-of-age breakout 'Bonjour Tristesse' (1958), the movie that inspired Godard to cast her. Those experiences must have made dealing with someone like Godard, who wrote that day's script pages for 'Breathless' over breakfast across the two-week shoot, and regularly threw out said pages or balked at his collaborators who accused him of shirking eyeline and continuity conventions. One of this film's big laughs comes from Belmondo (Aubry Dullin) bloodied and running through the street for the 'Breathless' finale, reassuring Parisian passers-by that it's only a movie. Some of the callbacks to elements of 'Breathless' outside the recreated production wear thin, like the repeated use of 'dégolas,' in reference to one of the 1960 movie's great quotable lines, outside of context. There's a bit of tee-hee you-get-it-right? to its inclusion in an early scene between Godard and his producer, Georges de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfürst). There's a buddy comedy element to Godard's at times tempestuous relationship with his producer that makes for some of this film's most trenchant inquiries into the filmmaking mindset. 'Paying audiences enjoy a formal narrative,' he cautions Godard as disasters on 'Breathless' pile up — a wink to how resistant audiences were toward experimentation in favor of easier, blandly reassuring stories that tell you how to feel, and when, and why. That hasn't changed, as we all know, as the indie film hemisphere continues to dangerously contract. Linklater has long been an independent filmmaker who's only courted the studio system (his recent Netflix premiere 'Hit Man' is easily his most commercial film to date, though there have been others) without ever being asked to conform ('Waking Life' or 'A Scanner Darkly,' anyone?). There's no question Linklater identifies with Godard and is, like any filmmaker of his caliber and contemporary, one continually inspired by the French director's iconoclasm and stylistic derring-do. That said, 'Nouvelle Vague' isn't trying to be a movie that matches Godard's style or temperament, but is closer to the more conventionally shaped narratives driven by some of Godard's less canonical peers and many imitators. Godard gets sage advice from Roberto Rossellini (Laurent Mothe) in the run-up to making 'Breathless'; I can't corroborate whether this encounter ever happened, but Linklater drops in similar run-ins (like with Bresson shooting 'Pickpocket' in a Paris subway tunnel) that serve more to tell the story of the French New Wave, to capture its zeitgeist and energy, than a coherent by-the-books retelling. Which would be a drag, anyway, even as fastidious recreations of 'Breathless' movie moments might tell a different story. These French New Wave filmmakers, after all, were just running around Paris with cameras. Still, none were quite so making-it-up-as-they-went-along as Godard. David Chambille's celluloid cinematography and a period jazz soundtrack immerse us in this world more than the features of 'Midnight in Paris' managed to, while Catherine Schwartz's editing moves us through the 'Breathless' production at a quick clip. But these elements may not, for a naive audience, successfully make the case for the brilliance of 'Breathless' and how its pulp and punch inform pretty much everything such a younger audience watches these days. Hopefully, 'Nouvelle Vague' encourages you to look back and watch 'Breathless' again — or for the first time — but Linklater's movie may inadvertently suggest, 'You could just watch this one instead.' 'Nouvelle Vague' premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution. Want to stay up to date on IndieWire's film and critical thoughts? to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings — all only available to subscribers. Best of IndieWire The 25 Best Alfred Hitchcock Movies, Ranked Every IndieWire TV Review from 2020, Ranked by Grade from Best to Worst
Mint
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Mint
Cannes 2025: ‘Nouvelle Vague' is a winsome homage to Godard
'Reality is not continuity!" exclaims Jean-Luc Godard during the making of À Bout de Souffle, as a script supervisor attempts to remove a coffee cup that hadn't been there in the previous shot. Correction: exclaims the actor playing Godard in Nouvelle Vague, Richard Linklater's film about the making of the 1959 French New Wave classic. (As if all this wasn't meta enough, try watching it at the Cannes Film Festival in a theatre full of critics and filmmakers.) It's a bold move to tell a story about the making of one of the most influential—and most studied—films in cinema history, particularly one whose place in the canon marks a disruption of all the filmmaking conventions that came before it. Add to that the notion of an American director assembling this homage to one of France's biggest icons and things could go horribly wrong… if it weren't for the fact that it was Linklater behind the camera. Over the last 30 years he has challenged the conventions of filmmaking in his own ways, most notably with his Before trilogy of films, all shot nine years apart to allow for the story (co-written with his actors) to naturally age and mature with time. His other speciality is capturing the bravado and insouciance of youth, which we see here in the form of a 29-year-old film-critic-turned-filmmaker who made his very first film in a span of 20 days without much of a plan. Experimental and unstructured as Godard's style may have been, Linklater's Nouvelle Vague is not. But it's also not trying to be. 'You can't imitate Godard. You'd fail," he said at a press conference at Cannes. Meticulously plotted and rehearsed, the film has a beginning, middle and end—in that order. (Another deviation from the Godard school of action.) It opens with Godard bemoaning how his fellow film critics (such as Claude Chabrol and Francois Truffaut) at Cahiers du Cinema made their directorial forays before him. Spurred into action by the fear of being left behind, Godard gets producer Georges de Beauregard to fund his debut feature based on a rough story outline written by Truffaut, and casts Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg as the leads. Most of Nouvelle Vague is dedicated to the production process of the film, and how Godard bucked convention at every turn. Take for example: showing up to shoot without a script, avoiding rehearsals so as to capture his actors' instincts, choosing to have key action sequences take place off-screen. Though much of this is already well known and documented, what sells this particular peek behind the scenes is the cast, made up almost entirely of unfamiliar faces. Guillaume Marbeck is an incredible find; the unknown French actor is the spitting image of Godard, aided by the signature dark sunglasses that don't come off for even a moment. Hollywood actress Zoey Deutch nails Seberg's off-kilter American-accented French, and another unknown French actor Aubry Dullin rounds out the trio with his playful (and equally charismatic) Belmondo. Shot on 35mm film in 1:37 Academy ratio, the black-and-white film was shot to look like the films of that era, meaning it also does not feature any camera movements or stylistic choices that didn't exist prior to when Breathless (as it's known to English-speaking audiences) was made. 'In making this film, I felt like I had erased my own history," said Linklater. 'I was going back to being in my late 20s making my first film. I also had to erase cinema history after 1959. So I was going back in time personally and cinematically." The film keeps up a zippy pace throughout, though its periodic pauses to introduce seminal characters of that time—Agnes Varda, Jean-Pierre Melville, Robert Bresson and the like—start to wear thin after a while. Some of the strongest moments are when Godard butts heads with his producer, who is becoming increasingly worried that his director seems to be eschewing a formal narrative in favour of creating an improvisational rhythm all his own, and also has a penchant for shooting only when inspiration strikes (even if that's just two hours a day). Nothing about Linklater's film is as audacious as Godard's debut but it has a winsome exuberance that's quite infectious. Perhaps where the film will be most successful is among young audiences unfamiliar with these French New Wave pioneers, and with cinephiles for whom films about films have always been catnip. It may not matter that Nouvelle Vague isn't doing anything novel. It's made with such sincerity and such a reverence for not just the craft of filmmaking but for the leap of faith required to undertake such a thing that it's impossible not to be won over. Back to the forest Exactly 56 years after Satyajit Ray made Aranyer Din Ratri (Days and Nights in the Forest), his beautifully observed film about complex social dynamics between a group of young friends and strangers, a restoration of the classic was screened at the Cannes Film Festival. The process of its meticulous 4K restoration was initiated by Wes Anderson, an avowed Ray fan, in his capacity as a board member on Martin Scorsese's Film Foundation. In his opening speech at the Cannes screening, Anderson said, 'Days and Nights in the Forest is one of the special gems among (Ray's) many treasures. I first saw it 25 years ago on a very strangely translated, blurry, scratchy, pirated DVD from a little Bollywood shop in New Jersey. And I hope you'll enjoy it tonight, perfectly restored, as much as I did then." The film's stars Sharmila Tagore and Simi Garewal were in attendance at the screening alongside Shivendra Singh Dungarpur from India's Film Heritage Foundation, which supported the restoration process in collaboration with Janus Films, The Criterion Collection and the Golden Globe Foundation. Recalling the sweltering summertime shoot, Tagore shares, 'It was so hot we could only shoot from 5.30-9am and then again from 3-6pm. The rest of the time was just adda, it's a Bengali word which means bonding and making friends…Sadly, Simi and I are the only survivors (from the cast); everybody else has passed on. So I will see my old friends on the screen and relive those lovely moments." And in her closing words of thanks, Garewal said to Anderson and Dungarpur: 'You've not only restored this film, you've made it immortal." Pahull Bains is a freelance film critic and culture writer. Also read: India's bars get creative with zero-proof drinks
