Something to Declare: Essays on France and French Culture by Julian Barnes Page A

(Michèle Mercier), the jolly tart who lives next door, sidles in with an offer. Charlie says he lacks the money; she offers him credit; he declines. None the less she stays, undresses, climbs into bed beside him, and sits, her breasts fully visible, talking about a movie she's just seen. He interrupts her: “In the cinema, it's always like this,” —and he pulls the bedclothes up around her into a parody of the starlet-sitting-respectably-up-in-bed shot. It is lightly done, and fits the jokey, tumbling relationship between Charlie and Clarisse. Still, it has its echo. In the cinema, it's always like this: but it isn't like this in life, and from now on it won't be like this in the cinema either.
    My movie education began in Paris during the early Sixties, when the nouvelle vague was still a surfer's paradise. Godard 's A bout de souffle, with a script by Truffaut, seemed the ultimate modern film: brave, nose-thumbing, hip, stylish, sexy, anti-authoritarian, above all true to the jagged inconsequentiality and moral vacuum of life as Godard and I (plus Truffaut and a few more initiates) perceived it to be. Like Tirez sur le pianiste it thrilled to loucheness and the rough touch of urban contemporaneity: “The Underpass in Modern French Film” is a thesis waiting to be written. If the theme of both films was Man on the Run, the technique was Camera on the Run: the lens probed and wandered, scuttled and hopped. Godard and Truffaut were exultantly picking apart the grammar of film and risking new combinations; together they were seeing afresh both life and the possibilities of art, in a joyful collaborative rivalry reminiscent of, well, Braque and Picasso perhaps.
    Watching A bout de souffle again after a gap of more than twenty years, my first reaction was to lament the way things seem unquenchably novel when you are eighteen because of an unawareness of context and prehistory. In the present case: tone from American film noir, moral stance from L'Etranger (much watered), pretentiousness and fake aperçus from avant-garde café life. Today the shooting of the policeman in the opening minutes no longer seems to me a moment of liberating, audacious anarchy, but a calculated ploy by both anti-hero and director/writer (kill a cop to give your film a gallon of plot-gas). What still grips, however, is the panache of Godard's direction. Here is someone in immediate control of the medium, confident enough to try anything (how long can that sequence of Belmondo and Seberg not going to bed together possibly last? Well, about as long as the parallel sequence in Tirez sur le pianiste where Thérésa confesses her “vileness” with the impresario). The zest, the cockiness, the sheer ardour of filmmaking remain as infectious as ever, and almost cover up the melancholy truth: that A bout de souffle is a tremendous display of style balancing on a minimum of content. The closeness of Truf-faut and Godard at the time of these two films was deceptive. A bout de souffle still looks more accomplished than Tirez sur le pianiste. But Truffaut was just trying on the bell-bottoms; Godard was laying in a lifetime's supply.
    The nouvelle vague was a revolt against le cinéma de papa, but it was less a matter of mass parricide than of selective culling. The wisest innovators know—or at least find out—that the history of art may appear linear and progressive but is in fact circular, cross-referential, and back-tracking. The practitioners of the nouvelle vague were immersed (some, like Truffaut, as critics) in what had preceded them. This was perhaps the only artistic revolution that began in a museum (the Cinémathèque), and in their films the revolutionaries acknowledged with many a wink and nod their favoured masters: thus in La Nuit américaine the film crew set off for a location shoot down the Rue Jean Vigo. Such hat-tipping was returned: Jean Renoir (Truffaut's French hero as opposed to his American hero, Hitchcock) slyly dedicated My Life