Alan in Belfast: Nouvelle Vague – a satisfying dive into the world of early French New Wave cinema (Queen’s Film Theatre from Friday 30 January)

As the last of his coterie of pals to make the dive into directing, film critic Jean-Luc Godard believes that it’s long past time to bring his own vision of cinema to the silver screen. Over 106 minutes we watch Godard persuade and cajole producer Georges de Beauregard to take a chance on him and then witness the disorganised process of shooting his debut feature.

With only a short film under his belt, Godard (played by Guillaume Marbeck) seeks out advice from numerous established directors, allowing us to see a hint of the genesis of his style of using the first or second take, letting his actors find inspiration in the moment, not overly worrying about continuity, filming guerilla style with passers-by becoming unwitting extras, throwing in jump cuts and liberally crossing the line with camera angles that will never match up in the edit.

While Nouvelle Vague (New Wave) works as a standalone film, for the princely sum of £3.50 any number of streaming services will allow you to watch the 1960 classic À bout de souffle (Breathless) beforehand, or in my case very soon afterwards. It’s widely regarded as a treasure of the early French New Wave movement.

Godard’s vision – if it is even as developed as that – is sustained by the craft of his cinematographer Raoul Coutard (Matthieu Penchinat), a war photographer with a flare for documentary-style shooting. Yet watch out for the fine details, like reflections in an actor’s sunglasses that bring a quality to the storytelling (and match scenes from the original film). The recreated scenes are a fine match for the original.

Aubry Dullin portrays actor Jean-Paul Belmondo who played the petty criminal and accidental cop killer Michel Poiccard in the original. Zoey Deutch stars as Jean Seberg, the actress who played Patricia Franchini, a student journalist selling copies of the New York Herald Tribune on the streets of Paris, and the romantic interest of Poiccard who he wants to join him in running away to start a new life.

Shot in moody black and white in Academy ratio to match the original film, Nouvelle Vague’s jazz soundtrack adds to the spontaneity of director Godard as he stumbles through an increasingly anarchic shooting schedule (“That’s all for today, I’m out of ideas!”) to assemble the parts necessary to make a film that has a few pages of treatment but no complete script.

Just as Marbeck captures the infuriating nature of the unphased director, Deutch depicts the exasperation of an actress bobbing about in a sea of chaos and reputational risk. Rising like a pillar of calm and preparation, assistant director Pierre Rissient (Benjamin Clery) emerges as the man who creates some of the beautiful touches that make the original film shine.

One character asks the question that is on the tip of every audience member’s tongue: “Are you making up how to direct as you go along?”

It’s only when you watch the original film that it becomes apparent that the crucial choice of hand-held camera and lack of sound synchronisation freed Godard to rearrange scenes and dub the dialogue on afterwards to create a cogent narrative.

Modern day director Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague is a fond look back at a pivotal moment in French cinema that changed so much and made it possible to break so many rules in the name of creating better art. It is being screened in Queen’s Film Theatre from Friday 30 January.