The nouvelle vague is now at least six years old and the time has come to take stock. Perhaps the best way to do this is to consider the work of Louis Malle, never at the heart of the group who took the headlines, yet in a way the nouvelle vague’s arch-exponent, and certainly its most consistently successful in terms of both box-office and prizes. In his latest film, Le Feu Follet, Malle showed himself perhaps closer to the original spirit of the movement than others who have sheered off in their own personal or hyper-personal directions. Malle, the most eclectic, is also the most typical. The paradox need not surprise: unable to develop a style with its own dynamic, the eclectic devises a composite, whose surface shimmers with unresolved tensions, but which is easily assimilable. In the wrong circumstances, the eclectic becomes either an academic or a grotesque. Malle, an intelligent director, has been saved from these extremes both by the progressive atmosphere surrounding him and by his own good judgement. But, whereas Godard is Godard and Truffaut is Truffaut, Malle is the nouvelle vague.
It is worth recapitulating why it was that the first films of the movement created such a vivid impression of novelty. Partly it was a question of mise en scène: semi-newsreel, often hand-held camerawork; a carelessness about framing and a much greater insistence on texture; a belief that the camera should follow actors encouraged to act naturally rather than perform in front of the autocratic camera; a new willingness to use unorthodox effects more or less casually rather than as set-pieces. Partly it was a new approach to content and a new kind of content: episodic construction, often with many parentheses; a fearlessness about introducing ‘intellectual’ material, conversation and allusions; a phenomenological approach to domestic psychological problems; a more candid treatment of sexuality; a preference for natural, ‘spontaneous’, rather than instrumental, plot-forwarding dialogue, often improvised on the spot. Other features were more superficial: in-jokes, tributes to the American gangster movie, visual puns. Also there was a clear insistence, often to the point of flagrancy, on having a developed cinematic culture, leading to an insistence on clear-cut directional control.
Almost all these qualities and characteristics are to be found in Malle’s films. His first film, Ascenseur pour l’echafaud, did not fully satisfy him—Unlike other nouvelle vague directors, who managed to make their own projects as first films, Malle had the screenplay forced on him. It was a film which was given nouvelle vague treatment (the Miles Davis soundtrack, for instance), it established Malle’s talent, but did not give him the chance to make his own film, in the way that the nouvelle vague director, critically formed by the politique des auteurs of Cahiers du Cinéma, necessarily wished. Yet it still remains uncertain whether Malle ever has made his own film. Les Amants, his next film and his own project, was clearly too concerned with the kind of preoccupations a nouvelle vague film ought to have. Its central feature; a long erotic sequence of love-making, signalled a new liberty without making any real new advance. The plot, despite its modern trappings—the 2cv and the bathroom—was essentially ultra-romantic and anachronistic. As so often with Malle, the most distinctive feature of the film was its ornament: the polo, the bathroom, etc.