Richard Linklater (2025)
The second Richard Linklater film to open within the space of a few weeks (after Blue Moon), Nouvelle Vague is also the second cinema biography of Jean-Luc Godard in recent years. Linklater’s film could hardly be more different from Michel Hazanavicius’s Redoubtable, aka Godard Mon Amour (2017). Redoubtable was made by a Frenchman who clearly disliked Godard as a public figure and judged the French Swiss an overrated filmmaker. Nouvelle Vague is the work of an American devotee, a grateful commemoration of Godard’s originality and influence. The title suggests that Linklater is celebrating a cinema movement, rather than an individual. He is to the extent that early scenes focus on the enthusiastic reception of François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows at Cannes in 1959 (where Truffaut was named Best Director); Nouvelle Vague’s closing shot is a freeze frame of Godard and Truffaut together, pals and partners. There are brief references to their earlier careers, and Claude Chabrol’s, as critics for Cahiers du cinéma. Over the course of Nouvelle Vague, other French New Wave luminaries are in plentiful evidence, however briefly. But Linklater gives Godard the lion’s share of the action. His film mainly dramatises the creation of Breathless.
Nouvelle Vague is made by a knowledgeable cinema fan and made for other such fans. Whenever a significant figure appears for the first time, Linklater puts their name on the screen. A reasonably well-informed viewer will recognise the names of other New Wave filmmakers – Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, Éric Rohmer, Agnès Varda and her future husband Jacques Demy – and of illustrious figures from outside the movement who make cameo appearances in Nouvelle Vague (Robert Bresson, Jean Cocteau, Jean-Pierre Melville, Roberto Rossellini), but we mostly need the names to identify these people (all of them played by unfamiliar faces). In many cases, their first appearance in Nouvelle Vague will be their only appearance, but announcing the names certifies each person’s contribution to what Linklater sees as a seminal time and place in cinema history. What’s more, he names not just the auteurs but other key members of the Breathless crew – right through to a late scene of Godard in the cutting room, with his editors, Cécile Decugis and Lila Herman. I kept wondering what a non-clued-up audience would make of Linklater’s well-intentioned name-dropping.
This might give the impression that Nouvelle Vague is earnest, but it’s earnest in intention rather than execution. Richard Linklater wasn’t born until the year in which Breathless appeared, yet his film has a nostalgic feel from the word go. Like Breathless, it has black-and-white cinematography (by David Chambille). The contemporary jazz on the soundtrack is designed to evoke the late 1950s setting and reflect Godard’s innovative, improvisational film-making approach. The soundtrack features music by, among others, Count Basie and Quincy Jones, as well as Martial Solal, who wrote the music for Breathless. With Godard (Guillaume Marbeck) his leading man, Linklater describes the recruitment of Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch) and Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin) to play Patricia and Michel in Breathless; the writer-director’s interactions with Truffaut (Adrien Rouyard), Suzanne Schiffman (Jodie Ruth-Forest) and his assistant director, Pierre Rissient (Benjamin Cléry); and Godard’s disputes, including one physical fight, with his producer, Georges de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfürst). Breathless was shot in just twenty-three days during August and September 1959: once filming is underway, Linklater presents a numbered day-to-day account of progress. Cinematographer Raoul Coutard (Matthieu Penchinat) hunkers down inside a small postal cart moving along to capture the action on the Champs-Élysées. After failing to persuade Truffaut to do a walk-on part as an informant who points out Belmondo’s Michel to the police, Godard himself does the walk-on.
Linklater is recreating something momentous in cinema history, but he keeps things light, not to say lightweight. That’s certainly a quality of his capable main actors, especially Aubry Dullin – who conveys Belmondo’s game-for-anything geniality but has little of his complex, powerful screen presence. It’s only in occasional shots, where Dullin’s in shades and shown in profile, that he suggests the original. Guillaume Marbeck, needless to say, wears the main man’s trademark sunglasses throughout, and does a good job of playing Godard, but Zoey Deutch is the best of the three principals – persuasive both as Jean Seberg and as Seberg’s Patricia in the film-within-a-film sequences. Nouvelle Vague has been particularly well received in France (ten César nominations). This may partly be because the film’s dramatis personae are better known in France than in the English-speaking world. It probably also matters that the actors in larger roles are passable reincarnations of the people they’re playing yet not so dazzling as to obscure memories of French cultural icons.
Godard’s enthusiasm for certain Hollywood types, tropes and screen legends, which was integral to Breathless, and Linklater’s admiration for Godard and the French New Wave, lend Nouvelle Vague an appealing Franco-American complementarity. (Holly Gent and Vincent Palmo, who’ve worked with Linklater several times previously, including as co-scenarists on Me and Orson Welles (2008), wrote the screenplay in English; Michèle Halberstadt and Laetitia Masson then adapted it into French.) You come out with the feeling that Linklater has made the film he wanted to make, and you like him for making it. You also like him more than you do his protagonist. That Guillaume Marbeck’s Godard is much less objectionable than Louis Garrel’s version in Redoubtable, owes something to Linklater’s respectful affection, leavened with a sense of humour that Godard apparently lacked. In Nouvelle Vague, he’s forever spouting his own epigrams or quoting the aphorisms of elder statesmen of cinema and other art forms. He always knows he’s right, is nearly always intolerant of colleagues’ suggestions, and especially exasperates members of the Breathless cast and crew used to more conventional, less impromptu ways of working. Although Nouvelle Vague is nice to watch, Godard is sometimes such a pain you need to keep reminding yourself that his ends justified his means. His abrasive, unyielding self-confidence in making Breathless delivered a brilliant film.
29 January 2026
