Breathless: Take Two

The 34^th Philadelphia Film Festival last month was wonderful. Out of the one hundred plus films I saw fourteen. Junior varsity ranking compared to the badge holders, but I chose well. La Grazia by the Italian visionary Paolo Sorrentino was one of my favorites as well as Calle Málaga with iconic Carmen Maura still beautiful and supple. But nothing compared to Nouvelle Vague and Blue Moon, both dealing with artistic creation and transformation, both directed by Richard Linklater and just released in October 2025.

A chamber piece, Blue Moon tells the story of Richard Rodgers’ ex-creative partner, Lorenz Hart, played by an unbelievable Ethan Hawke. Hart is at the end of his career; in fact, we see him dying, due to complications of alcoholism, in the first scenes of the film. Thus, the entire action is a flashback that takes place at New York’s Sardi’s on the evening of the premiere of Oklahoma! Which is Rodgers first play with his new lyricist, Oscar Hammerstein.

The claustrophobic set in the famous restaurant reminded me of My Dinner with Andre (1981, directed by Louis Malle); Ethan Hawke can be as funny and indignant as Wallace Shawn any day. At first, Hawke is unrecognizable with a comb over, sleazily bent over, drooling over his drinks and paramour alike. I kept thinking that I was watching this coming year’s winner for best performance as a male actor. Margaret Qualley plays the gorgeous ingenue, Elizabeth, although she is a student at Yale School of Fine Arts and she really hangs around Hart because she wants to be introduced to Rodgers. Poor Hart is smitten with her but she “just doesn’t love him that way.”

If Lorenz Hart is frustrated and bitter at the end of his career in Blue Moon, Jean-Luc Godard (Guillaume Marbeck) is an auteur directing his first film, Breathless, in Nouvelle Vague. In a perfect example of meta-film, Godard is petulant, arrogant, presumptuous, witty; in other words, an intellectual creating the “French New Wave” cinema. The role of the American gamine played by Jean Seberg in the original film is recreated successfully here by Zoey Deutch, with an American accented French.

Despite the similarities in themes in Blue Moon and Nouvelle Vague, their design and techniques couldn’t be more different. Shot in black and white as the original Breathless, in contrast with the claustrophobic Sardi’s, Nouvelle Vague is filmed all over Paris, although not the tourist recognizable spots, but rather the anonymous streets and authentic cozy corners. There is also an endless coterie of actors who make cameo roles introduced by their real names to help the uninitiated in 1960’s French film.

Needless to say, I had to stream the original 1960 Breathless (Amazon Video) directed by the real Jean-Luc Godard with Paul Belmondo in his first significant role as the criminal and the ill-fated Jean Seberg as his ingenue American girlfriend. It feels like such an innocent motion picture now, despite all the unlawful acts, even a murder, until the closing sequence when the plot gets serious. I won’t reveal the ending, since it’s worthwhile to luxuriate in this remarkable picture to find out by yourselves.

I don’t remember seeing this original version of Breathless in Madrid, and Linklater’s interpretation is so evocative that it’s hard to tell them apart. As a young girl I used to go to the movies with my parents to the Tivoli Theater. Even on school nights we would run after dinner and catch the last session of the most recent Italian films by Rossellini or Fellini. No wonder I am a film buff now.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 5th, 2025 at 1:32 pm by conchaalborg and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.