Nouvelle Vague, Richard Linklater’s declaration of cinephile love

It’s been almost twenty years since Richard Linklater last won an honor in competition at the Cannes Film Festival. Nineteen years, to be exact, since then Fast food nation (2006), a feature film in which the author of the trilogy Earlier took the viewer into the heart of junk food. Suffice it to say an eternity for all fans of this American director with an eclectic filmography and for whom experiments with storytelling, Real life (2001) to Childhood years (2014), was never an obstacle, but a way to remain free and redefine oneself.

in New wavehis thirty-third film, the free electron of American auteur cinema traces the makingHold your breathfirst feature film Jean-Luc Godard taken in the summer of 1959. For this, the director began his story a few months earlier, at the Cannes Festival, where the project was then conceived by Godard under the direction of Claude Chabrol and Francois Truffautwhich was celebrated that year on the Croisette, which fell under his spellFour hundred strokes.

More than a portrait of a man and his art, Richard Linklater paints a portrait of an entire generation of filmmakers and resurrects the state of mind that filled this rich cinematic period, symbolized by the freedom of tone, improvisation, and commitment to the poetry of everyday life. “This is the story of a personal revolution in cinema, led by one man and all the people around him“, the director of Les Inrockuptibles confided.

True to his obsession with the passage of time and his adventurous artistic nature, the director also officially revisits this cinematic movement that revolutionized the history of the seventh art, appropriating its codes for progress, between elliptical editing, black and white, tonal breaks and handheld camera, to documentary fiction in the form of a vivid and inventive tribute. With this film, he signs a nostalgic confession of his love for cinema.