Nouvelle Vague: Richard Linklater’s joyful tribute to the free spirits of French filmmaking
The American director goes behind the scenes of Breathless’ historic production for a film that embraces Jean-Luc Godard’s cinephile passion and formal imagination.
- Reviewed from the 2025 Cannes Film Festival
“The best way to criticise a film is to make one,” runs the famous Godard axiom, and perhaps the same goes for loving one, where the criticism takes the form of a thoroughgoing attention to all the finer points. Richard Linklater’s delightful tribute Nouvelle Vague bristles with the deep-cut knowledge and zeal of a filmmaker who began his career programming marathon screening nights (a precursor to the Austin Film Society). His superbly cast and acted film plays out the run-and-gun production of Breathless (1960) on Paris streets, skipping along briskly to keep pace with Godard as a 29-year-old wunderkind impatient to make his mark.
Nouvelle Vague begins with Godard and his Cahiers du Cinéma cohort watching The 400 Blows (1950), Truffaut’s triumphant 1959 debut feature, which planted a flag for a new generation of filmmakers. Godard’s a late bloomer by these lights, and he’ll chafe at attaching Truffaut and Chabrol’s names to his feature to get it off the ground. But Linklater’s fondness for creative communities sets the tone, from the circle of Cahiers director-scribes to Godard’s filmmaking team, each identified with titles in brief to-camera portraits. The gang’s all here: Truffaut (ally and story maven), Rivette, producer Georges “Beau-Beau” Beauregard, but also less-spotlit figures like Suzanne Schiffman and the two women who cut Breathless, Cécile Decugis and Lila Herman.
After a sketch of the Cahiers scene and its quippy confidence, the Breathless production clock takes over with a daily sense of swing. Having scored a casting coup with Bonjour Tristesse star Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch), Godard must finish his 20-day shoot under challenges that are partly budgetary, partly self-inflicted: the newbie feature filmmaker writes his script pages on the fly and skips days (or wraps early) as his artistic rhythms move him. Eyes hidden by shades, speaking in quotations and coining his own aphorisms, Godard is wittily self-confident but also just a strange one, as uncannily embodied by Guillaume Marbeck: by turns brusque or aloof, then disarmingly open-hearted and charming; doubtlessly pretentious but making good on his pretentions.
The “making of” sequences – Michel and Patricia hanging out in a tiny Paris hotel room, the finale of Michel’s running death – capture the alchemy of directorial decisions, big and small, offhand or seemingly long-held by Godard, or cribbed (say, a shot plucked from Sam Fuller’s 1957 film Forty Guns). In the best way, it’s like watching Breathless with Linklater’s live commentary, noting, for example, DP Raoul Coutard’s background as a war photographer in Vietnam, or how Godard came to play the man who informs on Michel. The husky black-and-white of Nouvelle Vague (shot by David Chambille, a recent Bruno Dumont associate) references the fast film stock of Breathless with every frame. Likewise, the quotation-heavy dialogue (in a screenplay written by Holly Gent, Vince Palmo, Michèle Halberstadt and Laetitia Masson) might grate in other historical films but here feel part of Godard’s language.
The buoyant cast shows the esprit de corps necessary to pull off Breathless and weather their young director’s demands. Deutch has Seberg’s lightness. But having come from working under the strictures of Otto Preminger, Seberg had concerns; as familiar as the lovers-on-the-run plot is, Godard’s eccentric twists must have been mystifying. Seberg blows off steam by mimicking the vaguely robotic intonations of her boss’s Vaudois accent, and as the not-yet-superstar Belmondo, Aubry Dullin nails his rangy boxer-clown persona, as well as the actor’s role as peacemaker, smoothing over ruffled feathers with jokes.
The general mood is that of being in on something with Godard and company, making Nouvelle Vague a bit of a caper film. Godard’s oeuvre went on to be gnarly in its reflexivity, which I think frees Linklater up to celebrate the sheer fun of art-making and, if you’ll pardon the echo, the breathlessness of Breathless. And when Roberto Rossellini, Robert Bresson, and Jean-Pierre Melville make appearances as mentors or idols, it’s not just another game of celebrity dress-up; that’s Linklater showing how the New Wave did not spring out of a vacuum, most notably in the immediacy and street-shoots of Neorealism – “Shoot quickly,” Rossellini advises, for one thing. There are more chapters to be told about Left Bank filmmakers like Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda, and Chris Marker, or the influence of cinéma vérité and Jean Rouch. Coming just a couple of years after Godard’s death, the movie is partly a memorial of a very specific moment of possibility, but its verve is an invitation to do it yourself, too.