Substack is life!

Disappointments are temporary. Art is forever

You ever see a movie character so well drawn and impactful that you start feeling and even acting a little like him/her as soon as you leave the theater or turn off the TV?

When I was young, it used to be James Bond. Didn’t matter how formulaic the movie was or how inelegant I can be in real life; Bond was always cool enough to give me a little extra swag for the rest of the day.

And it just happened again – this time not with Bond but with Jean-Luc Godard, the main character in Nouvelle Vague, director Richard Linklater’s account of the birth of the French New Wave through the making of Godard’s first feature, Breathless, which took the cinematic world by storm in 1960 and remains among the most influential films of all time.

Now I’m embracing my previously suppressed inner passion for Substack and, like Godard, constantly spouting aphorisms about the creative process. If you find any typos or grammatical errors, just imagine this new me, hard at work, listening to cool, late-’50s jazz and wearing sunglasses, day and night, which makes it hard to see my keyboard very well.

Besides, who cares about typos or grammar? I’m making art and can’t be bothered by trivialities. It’s like I always say, every good Substack has a beginning, a middle and an end, not necessarily in that order.

Sorry. Got carried away again.

As for the movie about the movie, we meet Godard (Guillaume Marbeck), when he’s a contributor to the esteemed film journal Cahiers du Cinema alongside such pals as Francois Truffaut, Claude Chabrol and other critics who are just then becoming major filmmakers right in front of his eyes. It irritates him no end that they’ve made the jump to features before him. He lives and breathes cinema and expected to have made more than just a handful of short films by now.

Encouraged, albeit halfheartedly, by his colleagues, (they’re French, after all), Godard steals a wad of thousand-franc notes from the Cahiers office and heads to the festival in Cannes, the only place where cinema still pretends to believe in dreams.

There he connects with Georges de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfurst), a (very) low-budget film producer and friend who agrees to give Godard his first shot, if he can make it for the right price, of course. They’ll use a story Godard has previously worked up with Truffaut about a small-time Parisian crook and the American woman who loves him — when she’s in the right mood. For the leading man, they’ll get Jean-Paul Belmondo, whom Godard has directed before in a short.

The name: A Bout de Souffle, which from my personal knowledge of French, translates into “A contest involving whipped-up eggs.” Breathless must’ve fit the poster better.

Godard has his eye on the transplanted Iowan, Jean Seberg, for the female lead, but she’s already made big films with Otto Preminger and Peter Sellers and will be impossible to land.

All the better — movies should begin with the impossible. Always.

The remainder chronicles the 20-day, Breathless film shoot, day by day. The production nearly falls apart on a regular basis, hampered by Godard’s predilection for writing and mostly improvising on set, shooting only a few hours a day, and spending the rest of his time playing pinball and thinking about tomorrow’s scenes.

Maybe you’re not a hard-core film fan and have no interest in seeing a black-and-white, French-language movie with a boxy aspect ratio about another black-and-white, boxy, French movie. But if you’re a creator at all – a journalist, an artist, even a smart entrepreneur, you may get caught up like I did in Godard’s absolute self-assurance and impassioned energy as he breaks every rule of filmmaking with unwavering confidence.

It helps that he has a great working relationship with Belmondo (Aubry Dullin), who shares his gift for spontaneity and for having a good time. On the other side of the coin is Seberg (Zoey Deutch), who doesn’t like shooting without makeup or continuity, not to mention a set script but her husband, another friend of Godard’s, talked her into it. She doesn’t trust Godard, but she clicks with Belmondo, and together they make movie magic.

Like Godard in this story, I live for my creative output and am doing it immersively for a pittance, most of which I’ve cajoled from friends who buy into my vision. So do your part, people! Upgrade those subscriptions to help me pay my streaming bills.

Time to enter the pantheon together. Let’s make Substack history!