Doing the Nouvelle Vague

If you’re going to see Richard Linklater’s reconstruction of the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s A bout de souffle — and you should, because it’s not just meticulous in its accuracy but enormous fun — then my advice is to stay to the end, all the way through the credits. At that point you’ll hear a 1959 hit by Richard Anthony which borrowed the name of the new movement in French cinema, from which Linklater also took the title of his film: Nouvelle Vague.

Like many French chart records of the time, Anthony’s “Nouvelle Vague” was a French-language cover of an American hit (he also covered “Peggy Sue”, “Let’s Twist Again”, “The Locomotion” and “Hit the Road, Jack”). In this case he took on the Coasters’ “Three Cool Cats”, written and produced three years earlier by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. With his producer/arranger, Christian Chevallier, Anthony kept Stoller’s tune and riffed in French on the idea of Leiber’s lyric.

The basic scenario is the same. A group of male teenagers are sitting in a car, hanging out, nothing much going on. With the Coasters, it was a beat-up car on a streetcorner in LA. But this is France. Our bunch of copains are in a little MG, illuminated by a streetlight, when three girls walk by, singing an Elvis Presley song. They get together: “On boit, on cause, on rit, on danse.” We drink, we chat, we laugh, we dance. But don’t forget: “Faut garder l’independence de la…nouvelle vague.” In other words, stay cool.