#jean-luc-godard

#jean-luc-godard

In "Nouvelle Vague," a new film from the director Richard Linklater, an impassioned young movie critic expresses his belief in what cinema could be-and frets about what he himself may never be. It's 1959, and the critic is Jean-Luc Godard, a soon-to-be leader of the French New Wave, a nascent movement of journalists who are trading in their typewriters for film cameras, aiming to ignite a cinematic revolution. But Godard, unlike some of his comrades, has yet to direct his first picture.

In 1953, when Godard's mother, Odile, sent him to work as a labourer on the construction of the Grande Dixence dam in the canton of Valais, Switzerland, it represented a desperate last throw of the dice for her wayward 22-year-old kleptomaniac son. Godard had returned to Switzerland to avoid being drafted into the Indochina war, but quickly found himself in trouble again.