On Failing to Decode the French New Wave

Sigh. It's another day, another movie, and another instance of my total failure to connect to one of the most historically important movements in cinema history: the French New Wave, or the Nouvelle Vague. Everything I've read about the films of Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, and many others in the late 50s and early 60s talks about how revolutionary they were to the medium. The New Wave not only revitalized the French film industry, but sparked similar alternative movements in other countries, including New German Cinema and New Hollywood. But after working my way through piles of Godard and Truffaut DVDs, I just don't get the films.

Oh, I understand the films. I can appreciate the style and the artistry that went into them on a technical level. The low-budget, innovative techniques that were developed by the New Wave directors are common to this day. In order to capture the zeitgeist of 60s Paris, they rewrote the visual language of filmmaking, introduced us to the jump cuts, rapid-fire scene changes, and avant garde narrative tricks. Truffaut and Godard were writers for the influential film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, who studied, evaluated, and championed films from genres like gangster and noir, deemed beneath the notice of the cinema establishment of the times. In that sense they were the 60s equivalent of Quentin Tarantino, who often takes inspiration from grindhouse and exploitation films. Tarantino, incidentally, is an avowed New Wave fan.

And yet I don't get anything out of the films. I've watched Godard's "Breathless," celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, and "Masculine Feminine" multiple times, trying to find something to connect to. "Pierrot Le Fou," "Alphaville," and "Contempt" left me baffled. Truffaut is even worse. "The 400 Blows," "Jules and Jim," "Shoot the Piano Player" – I couldn't make heads or tails of any of them. The plots mostly involve young people wandering around Paris, directionless, getting in and out of trouble, and projecting dissatisfaction at every step. They reject social conventions and have dysfunctional romantic relationships that always seem to end in disaster. The characters, famously dubbed "the children of Marx and Coca-Cola," exude cool but rarely do anything very smart.

I know part of the trouble is the lack of strongly structured narrative, one of the hallmarks of the movement. Godard famously intermixed parts of "Masculin Feminine" with real-life interviews and documentary-style footage, piling on multiple points of view. The only Truffaut film I really enjoy is "Day for Night," which is a very straightforward picture about a troubled film shoot, but it was made in the 70s and thus post-dates the New Wave. My favorite Godard, likewise, is "A Woman is a Woman," because I realized very quickly that the plot was secondary to watching the director play with captions, still poses, and color. But it's not something I want to revisit any time soon.

I tried again this weekend with Agnes Varda's "Cleo from 5 to 7." Varda was from a different branch of the New Wave directors, known as the Left Bank group, and was married to Jacques Demy, a director famous for his very accessible musicals, who is sometimes associated with the French New Wave and sometimes considered only a sort of ancillary presence. I loved Varda's "Vagabond" from the 80s, and figured a female perspective might make me more sympathetic to her characters. Alas, no such luck. Like all the other New Wave films, it's technically brilliant, following the titular Cleo for an hour and a half as she kills time before an appointment with her doctor. But Cleo – I had to read through the Criterion booklet to get any sort of insight into her capricious, distant character.

I suspect the biggest culprit here is context. I don't know much about French cinema, or the kind of movies the New Wave was rebelling against. Also, I think there's definitely some cultural and generational disconnect going on here, because I've watched American films with similarly restless characters and stories, which I could connect with – Jim Jarmusch's films come to mind. I knew I was supposed to read certain emotions and moods from Cleo that were totally going over my head, and I keep thinking that if I could just attune myself to the style of acting or that particular mode of fashionable behavior of 60s Paris, maybe I could see what everyone else loves so much about these films. So, in spite of all my reservations and frustrations, I'm going to keep watching, and keep trying to puzzle my way through them. Maybe I'll try Eric Rohmer next.

But first, I need a break. Kurosawa, here I come!