French New Wave

lovers-on-the-lam

As Truffaut had with Les Quatre Cents Coups, Godard shot the film on the streets he knew. ‘This documentary interest in places comes from the Nouvelle Vague,’ he told Film Comment in a 2005 interview concerning Notre Musique. ‘One of the things that bothered us in the French “tradition of quality” films was the complete lack of interest in places, which were neither understood nor looked at. When I put Belmondo and Jean Seberg on the Champs Elysées, it was because I walked up that avenue every day.’

Filmed nine years after its predecessor, Domicile Conjugal, this finale to Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel cycle delivers none of the drama suggested by its title, but instead finds Antoine looking back on his life after his break-up with Christine (Claude Jade). Cue a patchwork of clips from the earlier films, which serves to stir nostalgia for the peerless Les Quatre Cents Coups and emphasises the questionable necessity of a fifth episode in the story of Truffaut’s cinematic alter-ego.

du Mal, apparently an adaptation of Baudelaire’s collection of poems. Fuller declares that his film will be like a battle ground, encompassing love, hate, action and violence: ‘in one word, emotions’.

Recalling Fritz Lang’s appearance in Le Mépris, the influential American auteur Sam Fuller appears briefly as himself. Ferdinand meets him at a party where the director says he is in town to film Les Fleurs

Like A Bout de Souffle, the film divides its time between action sequences and pensive, discursive scenes. It serves up a typically Godardian buffet of both high and low culture references. Just as he had mixed Faulkner with Bogart in his first film, here the director includes references to art, poetry, film and philosophy. Like TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, the film is a kind of patchwork of references. The artists mentioned range from Roy Lichtenstein to Velázquez. The writers who are referenced are similarly varied and include Honoré de Balzac, Robert Browning (‘a poet named revolver’), Raymond Chandler, Joseph Conrad, F Scott Fitzgerald and William Shakespeare.

fast and loose a film as Godard has ever made, Pierrot le Fou recalls Howard Hawks’ maxim, that a movie’s plot could really be just an excuse for some good scenes.

Dark, impersonal and neon-lit, the city itself becomes a character in the film, more foreboding and perhaps more threatening than even the enigmatic Professor himself.

Perhaps Godard’s greatest achievement in the film is the creation of the hermetic, high-security city of Alphaville itself. Characteristically, he eschewed building the elaborate sets typically favoured by sci-fi directors, and instead shot the film on the streets of Paris. Some great locations were handpicked and then injected with a futuristic sheen, as in Il Nuovo Mondo, thanks to Raoul Coutard’s steely black-and-white cinematography. You can still visit the place where Caution stays. It’s the Scribe Hotel near the Place de

Something is not in orbit in the capital of this galaxy.’