TIFF 50: A Linklater Double Feature

by Cláudio Alves

Nowadays, if you're not named Hong Sang-soo, it's rare for a director to release multiple features in the same year. Rarer still for these projects to land on the main competition of two of the big three European film festivals, even winning an award when all is said and done. Well, that was the case this year for Richard Linklater, who bowed Blue Moon at Berlin and then took Nouvelle Vague to Cannes. Now, as happens with various of those fests' juiciest prospects, they are also playing at TIFF, where I had the luck to experience them back to back, finishing the day with a good old-fashioned double feature. Unfortunately, it's an unbalanced pair formed by one of the most disposable follies in the director's career and a gem seemingly composed to be seen as a minor work, that nevertheless sings the song of a major achievement…

NOUVELLE VAGUE 

The first thing one notices about Nouvelle Vague is how well it executes the stylistic proposition implied by its whole premise. For all intents and purposes, Linklater and his team have recreated the surface-level feel of those radical new things with which a generation of French filmmakers rocked the movie world. There's even a Godard-designed production logo on the opening credits, as if to convey the strike of authenticity that comes with such a personalized miniature. It implies a blessing that, truth be told, would more than likely have never come to pass or arrived in the form of a paradoxical pithy dismissal, mayhap an insult, or some other form of righteous putdown. 

Past the boundary of that credit sequence, everything is pristinely resurrected from the graveyard of cinema past. The 4:3 image is meticulously crafted in the style of Raoul Cotard and Raymond Cauchetier, complete with appropriate grain and artificial aging. Sets and costumes are designed with an attention to detail that verges on the archaeological, while the sound somehow crackles as if it were from 65-year-old recordings. Even the subtitle font is a reference. A wink among many, like the use of title cards to present the real-life characters, begging an erudite audience to pride themselves on knowing each and every name. It beckons a solipsistic pat on the back for the cinephile crowd, which, at film festivals, tends to be a winning formula for easy praise. 

As it depicts the making of Godard's first feature, Breathless, in 1960, one could expect the Nouvelle Vague to draw on the traditions of mise en abyme. It is, however, closer to some profane hideousness of cinema à la nécrophage. Make no mistake, this is as much a deadened, quasi-cannibalistic nostalgia play as those Amblin wannabes that started popping up and bringing in the big bucks this past decade or so. It's no wonder Netflix bought Nouvelle Vague out of Cannes. And, by the way, that title is a most foul lie. There is nothing new in sight, all old and done as pastiched into oblivion. The suggestion of a wave is just as absent. What we get instead is the stagnancy of staying in place, looking back, bereft of any movement or purpose.

It should come as no surprise that it plays best when inching away from the old young masters to explore Linklater's favorite hangout comedy beats with a pinch of French frustrations thrown in for good measure. In those moments, it at least overcomes the desperate need to be seen as cool, which, as expected, reeks of flop sweat and is the least cool kind of expression possible. In those moments, it sidesteps the looming shadow of its references and even escapes accusations of derivation. But it never lasts long and a portrait of vanguards addicted to risk-taking inevitably falls as far away from the vanguard as it's possible while regarding creative risk as someone with a deadly peanut allergy might regard a bag of Reese's cups. 

Had this script and its performance not been so eager to play the part of faithful to these icons of cinema, one might even suppose Linklater was working on a tacit critique. Zoey Deutch's Jean Seberg mocks Godard's attachment to citation as a device in both his improvised direction and life, echoing what I kept thinking about the film that contains them. Nouvelle Vague is caught between quotation marks. But no, the final product elides the possibility of discernible questioning of its characters. Sure, there are plenty of moments to laugh at Godard's antics. Still, they are always couched in the knowledge of his genius without a bit of bite or pushback against that notion. There will be no slaying of holy cows in Linklater's set. There will be no great cinema in the making either.

BLUE MOON 

Though they share an auteur and a loving preoccupation with the artists of yesteryear, Blue Moon and Nouvelle Vague couldn't be more different. That's partly due to the figures they each examine, their work and self-regard, their medium of choice. In his Cannes competitor, Linklater tried to copy Breathless and its cinematic sisters down to the tiniest detail. In Blue Moon, his approach is more evocative, gesturing at the stage-bound feel of a one-set narrative, the piteous ironies and witticisms with which the Rogers and Hart songbook is laden. That's evident from its opening salvo, a pair of opposite descriptions of the same man, soon joined by a third as his premature death is described over the radio and images of his crumped body on a rainy New York alleyway. 

Who was Lorenz Hart? Was he an enjoyable and dynamic figure, like his composer partner once said? Or the saddest man in the world? Mayhap, he was the genius mentioned in obituaries. Perhaps he was all three at the same time. Linklater takes that possibility and runs with it, flashing back to the night when Oklahoma! opened on Broadway, signaling the definitive end of Hart's longtime collaboration with Richard Rogers, who had, by then, found a new and more reliable lyricist in Oscar Hammerstein II. Not that Blue Moon is interested in replicating the folly and fantasy of that musical smash hit. We see only the briefest moment, and then it's down to Sardi's, where cast and crew shall wait for reviews before committing to a night of revelry.

From within and without that celebration, Hartz arrives early to that well-worn institution of the Theater District. Ethan Hawke plays him, twisted into the stature of a small man in more ways than one, transformed by hair and costume and a pair of cow brown contacts in a show of such flagrant falsehood that the performance beneath can't help but feel realer by opposition. Inde-fag-itable, he holds court in the empty bar and the audience in the palm of his hand, surrendering to the indulgent spirit of a film that's partially about a man, but more so about the pleasure of words, their beauty as appreciated by a connoisseur of such things. Indeed, through Hawke's performance, Robert Kaplow's screenplay sings an aria so stunning it could induce Stendhal syndrome.

To balance out the excessive verbosity on display, Linklater keeps things simple on the audiovisual front. Anamorphic lenses with their characteristic distortion and a wide screen are deployed to encompass the set and subtly contradict proscenium-like readings of the frame. Contrast is low and getting lower, telegraphing an atmosphere so suffused with dissipated smoke you can practically smell the burning tobacco and rolling paper ash emanating from the screen. The staging, too, goes for subtlety in place of more overt mastery, letting the room breathe in and out through the flow of people at the lobby, constantly visible on the out-of-focus background, as if to exclude Lorentz from their movement and snub him even in matters of film form. 

Yet, all that modest marvel is prologue, for the real fun starts when Hawke is finally joined by the two other primary players of Blue Moon. First comes Margaret Qualley as the 20-year-old object of the lyricist's obsession, Elizabeth Weiland. Freshly blonde of hair and dress and flowers with a red wine smile for contrast, she's the kind of person everybody loves. She's also elusive, slippery, a ghost with a heartbeat that never behaves as something so ineffable yet still conveys how others behold her in those terms. As Rogers, Scott is the opposite of Qualley and an even more assertive corrective to Hawke's Lorentz. Seeing the two share the screen is enough to grasp a lifetime of troubled partnership, like watching a tall glass of ice water fail to mix with a shot of oily liquor. Their disharmony is essential to the Blue Moon song on the screen, a soft, pathetic tune that flies by at 100 minutes but that I wouldn't have minded sitting through for hours on end.

Nouvelle Vague will enjoy a limited theatrical release on October 31, before its Netflix streaming premiere two weeks later. Sony Pictures Classics will release Blue Moon on October 17.