Saturday, July 30, 2016

Movie review - "New Wave" (1990) aka "Nouvelle Vague" *1/2

I'm not as across my Jean Luc Godard as a supposed film buff should be. This is from his later period - really, everything after 1969 counts as a "later period". It unites him with another 60s icon, Alain Delon.

For a while I went with this - the interesting use of sound, with overlapping dialogue, music, ambient sounds, etc and it's long tracking shots, eerie mood. The dialogue consists of quotations, often from other movies; names of characters and places are based on films, novels - eg To Have and Have Not, Perry Mason, Joseph Mankiewicz, Leave Her to Heaven, The Barefoot Contessa, The Long Goodbye, Dorothy Parker.

But there's no real story and after 15 minutes or so I started getting bored then I started struggling to stay awake. I say there's no real story but actually the germ of something interesting is in there - rich Domiziana Giordano picking up Alain Delon, then killing him, then Delon's doppleganger turning up... that makes this sound more interesting than it is.Hard core Godard fans should get something out of it.

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