27 June 2021

Jean-Luc Godard's Nouvelle Vague (1990)

Directed long after the 'Nouvelle Vague' period – if it really existed – and almost equally long after Godard's Dziga Vertov films, the film Nouvelle Vague is an oddity that many people would prefer to forget. With a dialogue full of literary and cinematographic quotations usually without mention of where they're from, this insane film has the gardener Jules speaking poetry as if it were ordinary speech, among many other unexpected oddities.

The very rich woman Elena Torlato-Favrini (Domiziana Giordano) hits Roger Lennox – a surname which evokes a character in Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye – in her car as he's walking on the road, takes him back to her home, takes care of him and keeps him in her home in Switzerland by Lac Léman. He's the quiet, thinking type and when she invites him to join her for a swim in the lake he refuses because he can't swim. Nevertheless she drags him in and he drowns, which doesn't seem to concern her at all.

Shortly after an identical man, physically, appears and says he's Roger's brother Richard. He's aware of the murder and becomes a director of one on Elena's companies in return for his silence. They become lovers and he's the dominant one. Again they go on Lac Léman but this time she's drowning and he saves her. But the odd thing is that he appears to be the same person as his 'brother'.

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