Nouvelle Vague

An older couple congratulates producer Georges de Beauregard on the success of his magnificent new film — politely interrupting young Jean-Luc Godard, who has been telling him that it’s dégueulasse, a load of shit. Possibly not the best way for an aspiring filmmaker to ingratiate himself with a producer, but Godard was never one for biting his tongue. Here, director Richard Linklater stages the generational rift that would inspire Godard and his fellow cinephile-critics at Cahiers du cinéma to take up arms against la qualité française — François Truffaut’s term for the polished, unimaginative literary adaptations that represented the old guard and, as they saw it, plagued French cinema. They would do so first with charged polemics on the pages of Cahiers, then with films of their own.

It’s 1959, and Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague begins by reminding us that Godard was lagging behind — the last of the Cahiers crowd to make a feature. Stealing money from the magazine’s office, Godard (newcomer Guillaume Marbeck) zips over to Cannes to catch the premiere of The 400 Blows and decides it’s now or never. With a treatment from Truffaut (Adrien Rouyard), Godard convinces producer de Beauregard — “Beau-Beau,” as he’s affectionately nicknamed — to take a chance on Breathless. Beau-Beau brings on board cameraman Raoul Coutard (Matthieu Penchinat) and a host of skeptical crew members. The actors are unlikely leading man Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin) and Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch), unlikelier still for the fact that she’s an actual Hollywood star.

Nouvelle Vague unfolds as a breezy, day-by-day account of the shoot, a series of scenes in which the perennially cryptic Godard springs surprise after surprise on his cast and crew. There will be no script, no sync sound, no regard for continuity. Some days, Coutard is bundled into a post trolley to get a shot of a busy Parisian street; others, Godard calls time after a few hours because he’s run out of ideas. There is always some problem driving someone mad — usually uptight Beau-Beau, who at one point gets into a fistfight with Jean-Luc after catching him skiving off at a café with a pinball machine.

The visual style of Linklater’s film successfully evokes Breathless’ own — black-and-white, 1.33:1 aspect ratio, even affectations like end-of-reel cue marks — while stopping short of outright pastiche. Linklater adds his own touches; in one self-reflexive scene, Godard pushes Raoul around in a wheelchair, and this makeshift camera dolly performs a dance with that of Linklater’s cinematographer David Chambille. Throughout, each lookalike is introduced with a to-camera portrait and a captioned name: Claude Chabrol, Éric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, Roberto Rossellini, Jean-Pierre Melville… the list goes on and on. (The fact that these are likely to make one think of Wes Anderson before Godard shows just how deeply the latter’s influence has been absorbed.) The deluge of references quickly becomes tiresome; the film starts to resemble a Marvel movie, rewarding viewers for having the requisite knowledge to recognize names, locations, behind-the-scenes photographs being recreated. There’s Jacques Demy and Agnès Varda! And over there — it’s Robert Bresson, filming Pickpocket on the Métro!

The same film-trivia logic reduces Godard himself to caricature. His dialogue is drawn almost entirely from his various writings: he will denounce short films; he will declare that all you need is a girl and a gun. This is admittedly a comedy, and one doubts Linklater and his co-writers (Holly Gent and Vincent Palmo) literally believe Godard spoke exclusively in aphorisms. But their unwillingness to look for cracks in his curated public persona means Nouvelle Vague tells us little that Godard’s own films haven’t already told us. Critics turned up their noses at Michel Hazanavicius’s Le Redoutable — heresy, to make a film that poked fun at Godard’s response to May ’68 — but at least that film tried to say something about Godard the man away from the camera.

“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal,” Godard quotes Eliot. But then again, he smiles, Gauguin: “In art one is either a plagiarist or a revolutionary.” It’s as if Linklater is leaving the loaded gun for the critic: you, Linklater, are a mere plagiarist. In admitting his theft, he hopes for absolution. But if Linklater’s argument is that what happened behind the scenes was as subversive as the finished film — shoot fast, follow your instincts, tear up the rules — then Nouvelle Vague is a simulacrum of an early Godard film in every way but those that matter. It disrupts nothing, on or off camera. The only reason this bears complaint is that once upon a time Linklater, like Godard, could synthesize his influences into films that were, if not revolutionary, at least forward-looking — films in which, say, the passage of time could be used as raw material.

If we’re long past la qualité française — past even its more recent American analogue “Oscar bait” — the festival prestige circuit still suggests its own ossifying trends: adaptations now expanded to encompass IP, A24-adjacent stylistic homages, the endurance of the biopic-industrial complex. Check, check, and check. What the New Wave once derided as cinéma de papa has become the cinema of the algorithm — a system that rewards recognition over surprise, citation over invention. Nouvelle Vague will have a brief theatrical run before landing on Netflix; fin de cinéma indeed. — THEO ROLLASON

The Ice Tower

Water — or, to put it more precisely, the inherent fluidity of it — is a central motif of freedom in all of Lucile Hadžihalilović’s films. Whatever time our adolescent characters spend floating inside it sharply contrasts with the otherwise rigidly systematic ways in which parents (as strict teachers, or vice versa) force conformity upon them in her first two films, Innocence (2004) and Évolution (2015). The camerawork and editing, too, feel considerably looser in these sequences than the Haneke-ian control that sets the oppressively austere tone of these two films. Free-floating becomes a quiet form of rebellion against rules and regulations, then, a momentary respite from the otherwise cloistered existence that our characters are forced to lead. In Earwig (2021) — Hadžihalilović’s most narratively dense film — water bodies like lakes and seas aren’t nearly as critical an element of the mise-en-scène as they are in the director’s first two films. But the very (absurd) conceit of the film is about a middle-aged man who must daily fashion new dentures out of ice for a girl with no teeth. Every day begins with him forcibly fitting these dentures into her mouth, but ends with that ice having melted into a puddle of water: try as he might, then, our protagonist can’t forever exercise his frigid control over this girl’s autonomy. Everything and everyone — especially the children in Hadžihalilović’s films — has a melting point.

Except, perhaps, in her latest feature film, The Ice Tower. The title clearly alludes to this frigidness, and the narrative only confirms it: unlike her previous films, in which adolescents, to varying degrees, wanted to float against the tide, our protagonist here, the 15-year-old orphan Jeanne (Clara Pacini), most definitely — almost defiantly — doesn’t. She wants to remain frozen in her naïve submission to Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale of The Snow Queen, so much so that the filmic (re)production of it, which she eventually becomes a part of, takes over her sense and semblance of reality. Every word — coldly whispered by the Snow Queen of the filmic production, Cristina (Marion Cotillard, appearing larger than life but giving an oddly pared-down performance) — echoes loudly for Jeanne both when she’s acting beside her in the film-within-the-film and outside of it. Jeanne, like most lost adolescents, looks for any form of acceptance to not feel like she’s free-floating through life. So, she understandably buys into the mythic tale and image of the Snow Queen and never wishes to let it go.

The critical issue with The Ice Tower, however, is that it never buys into Jeanne’s consistently confused subjectivity. Hadžihalilović’s previous films have been entirely committed to embodying our characters’ almost frustratingly irresolvable sense of mystery. Each of them dropped us in media res into their magnificently strange worlds, whose rules and regulations seemed arbitrary at first but gradually took on a systematic shape. In The Ice Tower, however, Hadžihalilović’s exquisitely composed images are overly exacting and over-insistently clear, making it the only project in her filmography that impresses without ever genuinely feeling expressive. Repeatedly throughout the film, Hadžihalilović pierces through Jeanne’s vivid imagination of The Snow Queen with such directorial precision that Jeanne’s collapsing sense of reality never blurs with the ongoing filmic reproduction of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale: there’s always a clear (and obvious) distinction between the real and the artifice. Take, for instance, a critical sequence involving Cotillard’s operatic entry shot as The Snow Queen. Even before we can feel the grand sweep of Jeanne seeing Cristina in the role of The Snow Queen for the first time, Hadžihalilović punctures its haunting allure by having the director of the film-within-the-film (played by Gaspar Noé, Hadžihalilović’s partner) suddenly yelling, “CUT.” Similarly, the film-within-the film’s production design — mostly composed in long wide shots to emphasize the corridors’ crumminess more than the extravagantly constructed set of the titular Ice Tower — stands as such a stark contrast to Jeanne’s “boundless and majestic” imagination of The Snow Queen that it becomes increasingly difficult to believe why Jeanne herself hasn’t snapped out of her illusion of The Snow Queen. We’re never really with her, then, throughout the majority of The Ice Tower; we simply follow her story from a distance, observing how imagemakers and imagemaking seduce her into accepting myth(making) as her reality.

In all too brief moments, however, Hadžihalilovic breaks free from this sterile deconstruction of imagemaking (and consumption) to remind us just how hypnotically alluring her filmmaking can be when entirely committed to collapsing the distance between the viewer and the screen. The pre-credits sequence and its matching closing one are, far and away, the most mesmerizing sequences in The Ice Tower because they entirely commit to embodying an adolescent child’s fragile and fractured subjectivity. There’s none of the sharp clarity that otherwise defines the rest of the film. Instead, these sequences are freeform cascading montages of blurry images projected as shimmering shards of white and deep-blue light, each containing either a child’s “boundless and majestic” vision of The Snow Queen, a hazy recollection of their past experiences, or a fleeting premonition of their future. There’s no way to delineate one from the other because that’s Jeanne’s experience of reality (and its blending with artifice). This formally unfettered representation of confusion — always fluid, always elusive — is what’s lacking from the rest of The Ice Tower; it’s all impressively controlled, all right, but barring these two memorably mesmerizing sequences, hardly moving. — DHRUV GOYAL

The President’s Cake

Poverty and opulence, the pastoral and the high-tech, war and peace, childhood and adulthood. Opposite ends of a variety of spectrums meet, and sometimes clash, in Hasan Hadi’s remarkably assured feature debut The President’s Cake. These meetings may be violently abrupt, as in the movie’s heart-stopping final scene, or wryly ironic, as in its first shot, where fighter jets zoom above a rural community, travelling across marshes via canoe to a food market. Or these meetings may be gradual, one of many journeys taken through its story, whether physical, emotional, or political.

The plot is simple, direct, and has the ostensible quality of a vehicle for social commentary — that it is, though the plot itself has a quasi-metaphorical quality so naked it’s patently textual, never subtextual. Some time in the 1990s, a nine-year-old Iraqi schoolgirl, Lamia (Banin Ahmad Nayef), is assigned the task of baking her class’ celebratory cake for the birthday of the nation’s leader, Saddam Hussein, a task bestowed unwillingly upon all classrooms in the country. Lamia lives the humblest of existences with her grandmother and their pet rooster, and the pair must travel to the nearest city to source the ingredients for the cake. The President’s Cake follows a well-trodden Neo-Realist path here — lower-class protagonists on a day-long odyssey through a city as rich with promise as potential disaster, encountering an array of helpful, helpless, and hostile people on their brief but eventful travels.

Key to the success of Hadi’s conceit is that he makes the Neo-Realist conveniences, immediately identifiable to cinephiles, work for his story, rather than making his story work for them. The people Lamia meets each have their own motives and agency, feeling neither like blunt narrative tools facilitating some development in her journey nor like indulgent detours, but rather like authentic portrayals of ordinary citizens as real and believable as she is. The plot’s race-against-time quality is never belaboured, nor is the cumulative stress and indignity heaped upon Lamia as her seemingly simple quest becomes ever more frustrated — these elements just quietly build in intensity as events befall our protagonist, enduring each challenge thrust upon her with the innocent objectivity of a young person on a mission.

The President’s Cake is a graceful, perceptive movie, where the authenticity of Hadi’s approach is accented and complemented by some beautiful touches. Pain and tragedy are offset by dark humor, as in a car ride where a recently blinded groom-to-be jokes about never having to see his bride’s face. The darkness reaches startling levels, as young Lamia is a prime target for adults, apparently only a little less desperate than she, willing to take advantage of her naiveté, though hardly prepared to be taken advantage of in return by her wiliness and resilience. The most poignant moment in the movie occurs when Hadi engages in perhaps his sole overt stylistic flourish — the camera leaves Lamia to share the POV of her friend, Saeed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem), as she dances with a singer in a café. He views them in a wall-mounted mirror, live and animated in reflection, as still images of Hussein appear to observe from next to the mirror. Gauche portraits of an already antiquated present, obsolete symbols of forced devotion, silently watch a living portrait of a moment of real joy in the real present.

The President’s Cake has all the elements of a quaint, speciously life-affirming tale of a child on a journey to maturity over one memorable episode; in plain terms, it’s very much such a tale, but Hadi avoids any quaintness through his incisive depictions of real life. The verisimilitude is constructed with humility and sensitivity, and you largely forgive the minor contrivances due both to this fact and to the fact that they serve Lamia’s story so well. Elegantly shot and fabulously acted by a mostly untrained cast of humans and one hugely winning rooster (truly, what movie wouldn’t be improved by the addition of a chicken?), this is a lovely, sincerely touching work, and one of the most impressive debut features of modern times. — PADAÍ Ó MAOLCHALANN

Bugonia

The bees are dying. That’s bad news for all of us, but for Teddy (Jesse Plemons), the apiarist at the center of Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia, it’s personal. He’s traced the die-off of his own small colony to Auxolith, a pharmaceutical megacorporation that’s made headlines for its controversial use of pesticides. Teddy’s grievances with Auxolith don’t stop there. He works for pennies packing boxes in one of the company’s warehouses, where he watches his colleagues work through injuries to keep their jobs. And, grievously, Teddy’s mother (Alicia Silverstone) ended up in a coma after participating in one of Auxolith’s clinical trials. It’s enough to drive him crazy.

Conspiracy is at the heart of Bugonia. That Auxolith is responsible for so much of Teddy’s strife seems clear enough, but the emotional impact of seeing both his mother and his passion project crippled by capitalism has bent the lines between A and B into an impossible knot. Teddy, along with his cousin, Don (Aidan Delbis), have plunged deep enough into a YouTube rabbit hole to come to believe that Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone) is not just the CEO of Auxolith, but an Andromedan alien sent to Earth to eliminate mankind. The cousins kidnap Michelle and lock her in their basement, where they shave her head and cover her in antihistamine cream — to prevent her from sending signals to the mothership, naturally — and demand to be taken to her leader.

Like Eddington earlier this year, Bugonia is a work of due anger and high farce, a satire so cloyingly of the moment that it risked dating itself before it reached theaters. A good deal of its ire is swung toward Michelle, a self-proclaimed “female CEO of high importance,” whose business acumen has woven so intricately into her personality that she can’t seem to drop corporate speak to (quite literally) save her life. Michelle is a paragon of the infuriating executive contradictions familiar to anyone who’s ever punched the clock in an office park. She leads companywide diversity efforts while berating her staff over her ghostwritten talking points, she encourages all employees to leave work by 5:30 (unless they have work to do, but no pressure), she approaches her own kidnapping as an opportunity to “reset with a dialogue.” If Michelle isn’t quite alien in form or execution, she’s at least representative of the sort of calculated, C-suite–forward poise that so often masks the economic brutalization of small American communities.

Bugonia handles Teddy with a bit more nuance, though his character is no less cutting. He’s sprung from the algorithmic byproducts that increasingly seem to knock modern men off their axes, and the movie doesn’t shy from the consequences of a terminally online education. Teddy is as assured as he is angry, having anted into a renegade dogma with such conviction that he doesn’t blink at the prospect of chemically castrating himself (or convincing Don, who lives with a developmental disability, to do the same). Lanthimos carved his name with stilted dialogue and Fabergé artifice, a muscled sterility to contrast the blood-blistered violence of his subjects. With Teddy, the leash is off. He speaks with the cadence of a burnout Craigslist roommate, as greasy and disaffected as anyone who’s ever talked your ear off about DMT.

Still, Bugonia offers Teddy enough understanding to keep its feet planted on his side of the class divide. For all his blackpilled extremism, there’s a tender undercurrent in Teddy that keeps you begging he’ll come to his senses. It’s difficult to ignore the lengths he takes to indoctrinate Don into his aspirational revolution, but his fraternal protection toward his cousin is undeniable — even when he’s gassing Don up to hold a woman at gunpoint. And, while it’s never leveraged as a mea culpa for his violence — little could while watching him electrocute Michelle for minutes on end — Teddy wrestles with a considerable amount of pain. His mother’s illness is revealed via a string of nightmarish vignettes as poignant and poetic as anything Lanthimos has shot, and when a local beat cop (Stavros Halkias) enters the picture, it’s all but insisted that he likely molested Teddy as a child. Lanthimos and writer Will Tracy (Succession, The Menu) don’t quite lean on trauma porn to excuse American men’s current ideological crises; instead, Teddy functions as an earnest complication of a man too far gone.

By now, Stone’s pedigree within Lanthimos’ think tank is well proven, and Plemons shows that his turn(s) in 2024’s Kinds of Kindness weren’t a fluke. Their combination is a thrilling bit of casting that sees two of this generation’s strongest performers beat each other to a pulp inside a bottle with shrinking walls. Michelle’s boardroom vocabulary inflames Teddy like yellowjacket venom; at a certain point, her insistence to “circle back” and “realign” reads as a deliberate provocation. For his part, Teddy proves that drinking the Kool-Aid hasn’t rendered him a fool — “I’ve read all the think-pieces,” he snarls at Michelle’s condescension toward his rank among 4chan detritus, a chilling nod to Plemons’ cameo in Civil War. Bugonia knows better than to attempt to solve for Trumpism, but Michelle and Teddy — the plutocratic neolib and the doomer accelerationist — feel like a sample slide of two plates grinding under an American faultline.

For the spoiler-averse, it may be good to stop reading here. Bugonia is a close adaptation of Jang Joon-hwan’s Save the Green Planet! (2003), and both films spend much of their runtime circling the same punchline: what if the kidnapper is right, what if the CEO really is an alien? Bugonia makes good on the threat, and, days removed from my screening, I’m struggling to decide whether the joke pays off. It’s deeply funny to watch Emma Stone ascend into space, to declare Earth a failed experiment and extinguish humanity with a pinprick. But the decision also sweeps the legs from the movie’s urgency, which burns like a cigarette under a bare heel for the 100 or so minutes beforehand. Charitably, ending the movie on a gag almost functions like a layer of metatextual nihilism. Bugonia finds humankind a few minutes past saving, a couple bickering about what to order for dinner on a sinking ship. — CHRISTIAN CRAIG