Breathless, deathless … and pointless? Here is Richard Linklater’s impeccably submissive, tastefully cinephile period drama about the making of Godard’s debut 1960 classic À Bout de Souffle, that starred Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo as the star-crossed lovers in Paris. Linklater’s homage has credits in French and is beautifully shot in monochrome, as opposed to the boring old colour of real life in which the events were actually happening; he even cutely fabricates cue marks in the corner of the screen, those things that once told projectionists when to changeover the reels. But Linklater smoothly avoids any disruptive jump-cuts.
It’s a good-natured, intelligent effort for which Godard himself, were he still alive, would undoubtedly have ripped Linklater a new one. (When Michel Hazanavicius made Redoubtable in 2017 about Godard’s making of his 1967 film La Chinoise, the man himself called that “a stupid, stupid idea”; Hazanavicius wasn’t even making a film about Godard’s first and biggest hit.)
