FASHION Magazine

  • The French New Wave spends July at Cinematheque Ontario

    Jean Seberg in Jean-Luc Godard's <em>Breathless</em>
    Jean Seberg in Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless

    When Stuart Murdoch, the sad singing Scotsman best known for fronting Belle and Sebastian, met his wife, he left her Breathless.

    Says the New York Times Magazine: “As a courtship present, Murdoch made her a replica of the New York Herald Tribune T-shirt Seberg wore in the opening shot of Breathless.”

    Cute, right? But then: “‘I may have also done that for an earlier girlfriend,’ Murdoch admitted sheepishly.”

    Ah yes. How appropriate. Like Murdoch’s women, all fashionable lovers of French New Wave know the delight of discovering a genre made exactly, exquisitely, for them—the super-chic haircuts, the striped shirts and plaid minis, the smoky-eyed (and forever smoking) gamines—only to realize they’re just the latest suckers for the lovely clichés of Parisian art-house cinema.

    But don’t let that stop you from falling: this summer, the Cinematheque at the AGO is screening gorgeous pics by Godard and his precocious coterie of peers.