REBIRTH OF LE COOL

Richard Linklater, Zoey Deutch and Guillaume Marbeck talk to Patrick Smith about 'Nouvelle Vague', which reimagines the making of 1960 French New Wave classic 'Breathless'

- Patrick Smith

“I thought I wasn’t cool enough, or that I wasn’t smart enough to get it,” shrugs Zoey Deutch, reflecting on her first encounters with French New Wave cinema. That’s why the 30-year-old, sharply cast as Jean Seberg in Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague, initially kept Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut and their trailblazing cohort at arm's length. “I didn't go to film school. I'm not French, I'm not a filmmaker. All these people who are much more interesting than me like this, so I thought, 'Maybe it's not for me.'”

She's not alone. Ever since Claude Chabrol kicked off the movement in 1958 with Le Beau Serge, his stark debut about alcoholism and moral decay in rural France, the Nouvelle Vague has carried a certain aloof mystique, its very existence a Gallic sneer at studio-controlled Hollywood. There are the sharp-shouldered suits and sleek rollnecks, the smoke from Gauloise cigarettes curling through Left Bank cafes, Jean-Paul Belmondo's cocky strut. Jump cuts. Long takes. A pixie-cropped Seberg peddling the New York Herald Tribune down the Champs-Élysées. Anna Karina, Sami Frey and Claude Brasseur dancing the Madison in a shabby café when not tearing through the Louvre in Godard's Bande à part (Band of Outsiders).

Few films today match Truffaut's Jules et Jim for its whirlwind love triangle, Jacques Demy's Les parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg) for uncanny beauty, or Godard's Weekend for sheer anarchic chutzpah. Elliptical in storytelling and cerebral in its provocations, the New Wave functioned as an all-out assault on convention, on bourgeois values, on cinema itself. It wasn't so much a wave as a cutting edge: rebellious and avant-garde. A little intimidating, too - just as Deutch describes it.