5 New Wave French Films
A revolution in cinema style that wowed the world
In 1959-60, a group of young French cineastes—critics, intellectuals, provocateurs—who loved the energy and verve of American films, took to the streets of Paris with lightweight handheld cameras and a fresh new approach to telling stories. They were called the Nouvelle Vague—the New Wave—and the movies they made were the indies of yesteryear: low-budget style-setters obsessed with living fast and dying young.
Breathless (1960)
Jean-Luc Godard was the New Wave wild card: a brilliant director who insisted on fragmenting and sending up the B-genres he adored—to dazzling effect. For this iconic film, his debut, he paired Jean Seberg, the exquisite Hollywood expat starlet with a chic boyish do, with Jean-Paul Belmondo, a rakish young Parisian boxer, and followed them around as they teased and slapped each other from scene to playful scene in a faux crime story about an outlaw on the lam and his faithless reporter girlfriend.
Jules and Jim (1962)
François Truffaut, Godard’s fellow critic and friend, was the other major pillar of the New Wave. His semi-autobiographical first film, The 400 Blows, about a young boy alienated from his broken family and society, defined the movement. Jules and Jim, his third, became its romantic peak. It stars the mercurial and riveting diva, Jeanne Moreau, and, as the two men who vie for her love, Oskar Werner and Henri Serre.
Les Cousins (1959)
Claude Chabrol took on the role among the New Wavers as the French Hitchcock: while Godard was a hip wise-ass and Truffaut a brooding sentimentalist, Chabrol always kept a steady eye on the nasty, evil and violent impulses within us all. This film, his second, is about two cousins studying law, one naïve and provincial (Gérard Blain) and the other a dissolute Parisian (Jean-Claude Brialy) intent on corrupting him. Fate does them in, of course, but there’s no let-up in suspense till the bitter end.
Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959)
Alain Resnais was the most cerebral intellectual of the New Wavers, but his movies were arguably the most beautifully and poetically filmed of all. Hiroshima Mon Amour is the tale of a affair and break-up between a French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) and an Japanese architect (Eiji Okada). The characters are enigmatically known as “Her” and “Him,” and the movie, shot in Japan and France, has rhythmic dialogue and a slippery narrative, cut with flashbacks and narration. The overall effect is mesmerizing.
Bay of Angels (1963)
In the macho Parisian boys club that was the New Wave, Jacques Demy was a sweet-tempered outsider from the Atlantic coast, a closeted gay man who ultimately died of AIDS. (He was married to Agnès Varda, a great filmmaker in her own right.) Though he’s best known for his sumptuous fantasy musical, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, this doomed tale of compulsive gamblers in love, starring Jeanne Moreau (bleached Marilyn blonde) and handsome Claude Mann, is a true New Wave classic, crisply shot on location in resort casinos.
