‘Nouvelle Vague' Review: Richard Linklater's French New Wave Cosplay Is More ‘Midnight in Paris' Than Histoire du Cinema
From Jean Seberg's sideswept pixie cut to Jean-Paul Belmondo's aviators, Jean-Luc Godard's 'Breathless' has become more fashionable in today's cultural imagination for its iconic looks and images than for how the jump-cut-pioneering renegade feature collapsed cinematic hierarchies as we knew them in 1960. That makes one of the greatest films of all time, and the standard bearer of the French New Wave, ripe for discovery for a younger generation — and fresher still for the older ones well familiar with it.
If the best way to criticize a movie, as Cahiers du Cinéma critic Godard once said, is to make one, then director Richard Linklater's answer to making a tribute to 'Breathless' might instead be to not quite criticize but certainly to subvert the tropes of movies about moviemaking. His black-and-white 'Nouvelle Vague,' itself a meticulous recreation of a movie made in 1959 with all the celluloid, Academy-ratio crackle and pop, is more New Wave hangout movie than cinema history, with the parade of faces and names inspiring knowing chuckles in the cinephile audience.
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Beyond Godard, appearances from Claude Chabrol, François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Robert Bresson, Agnès Varda, and more figureheads — all played by lesser-known actors with varying likeness to their real-life counterparts — make for a veritable who's-who soufflé more akin to Woody Allen's 'Midnight in Paris' fin-de-siècle cosplay, where run-and-gun appearances by literary and artistic idols like Salvador Dalí, Gertrude Stein, Alice Toklas, Man Ray, Luis Buñuel, and Djuna Barnes provided little more than window-dressing to a Belle Époque time travel exercise.
'Nouvelle Vague' is deeper than that, though a lot of these namedrops exist without context beyond 'look, here they are.' It's greatly amusing to play a kind of 'I Spy' game in 'Nouvelle Vague' as to who's who in the ensemble — though the filmmakers take the guessing out with name cards that introduce each character as if in a Wes Anderson or, perhaps, a Godard movie that inspired someone like Anderson. But 'Nouvelle Vague,' perhaps by design, fails to make the case that 'Breathless' was a groundbreaking endeavor at all. That's perhaps because the on-the-ground, glue-and-paper-clips late-1950s crew at the time (besides maybe except Godard himself) didn't know what they had their hands on or what shape it would take. Godard's revolutionary crime drama about a guy, a girl, and a gun comes off more like a pet project or even a student film here, part of both the charms and frustrations of 'Nouvelle Vague.'
Perpetually in dark sunglasses, newcomer Guillaume Marbeck plays Godard as little more than a caricature of the man who lagged behind his Cahiers du Cinéma peers (Rivette and Éric Rohmer among them) in terms of taking his cinephilia beyond the storied magazine and in front of a movie camera. But Marbeck cuts a rueful silhouette, a cigarette ever burnt to its nub in his hands, that could easily inspire some Instagram-friendly looks if 'Nouvelle Vague' finds the right audience (and I think a young one is ultimately what Linklater is after, here).
Well-cast is Zoey Deutch as 'Breathless' breakout Jean Seberg in her nascent prime, who made the film two decades before she succumbed to mental illness and likely killed herself after becoming an FBI target for her political views (though her death remains the subject of mystery and speculation, in places like the podcast 'You Must Remember This,' which offers an addictive season paralleling the careers of Seberg and Jane Fonda as Hollywood political outcasts). There's little foreshadowing of the Seberg that would be, though when she's not twirling in fountains in an A-line dress here, Deutch wryly plays Seberg as a kind of mischievous backstage drama queen, complaining about the amateur production and its lack of sync sound to her disaffected husband, the filmmaker François Moreuil (Paolo Luka-Noé) — her first of a few toxic husbands.
Seberg was mostly fluent in French, though Deutch (who maybe isn't) warmly captures the actress' charmingly terrible American accent — and even nails the intonation of 'New York Herald Tribune!' There's also reference to her fraught collaboration with Otto Preminger — he burned her at the stake quite literally for 'Saint Joan' (1957) and challenged her on the set of her coming-of-age breakout 'Bonjour Tristesse' (1958), the movie that inspired Godard to cast her.
Those experiences must have made dealing with someone like Godard, who wrote that day's script pages for 'Breathless' over breakfast across the two-week shoot, and regularly threw out said pages or balked at his collaborators who accused him of shirking eyeline and continuity conventions. One of this film's big laughs comes from Belmondo (Aubry Dullin) bloodied and running through the street for the 'Breathless' finale, reassuring Parisian passers-by that it's only a movie. Some of the callbacks to elements of 'Breathless' outside the recreated production wear thin, like the repeated use of 'dégolas,' in reference to one of the 1960 movie's great quotable lines, outside of context. There's a bit of tee-hee you-get-it-right? to its inclusion in an early scene between Godard and his producer, Georges de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfürst).
There's a buddy comedy element to Godard's at times tempestuous relationship with his producer that makes for some of this film's most trenchant inquiries into the filmmaking mindset. 'Paying audiences enjoy a formal narrative,' he cautions Godard as disasters on 'Breathless' pile up — a wink to how resistant audiences were toward experimentation in favor of easier, blandly reassuring stories that tell you how to feel, and when, and why. That hasn't changed, as we all know, as the indie film hemisphere continues to dangerously contract. Linklater has long been an independent filmmaker who's only courted the studio system (his recent Netflix premiere 'Hit Man' is easily his most commercial film to date, though there have been others) without ever being asked to conform ('Waking Life' or 'A Scanner Darkly,' anyone?). There's no question Linklater identifies with Godard and is, like any filmmaker of his caliber and contemporary, one continually inspired by the French director's iconoclasm and stylistic derring-do.
That said, 'Nouvelle Vague' isn't trying to be a movie that matches Godard's style or temperament, but is closer to the more conventionally shaped narratives driven by some of Godard's less canonical peers and many imitators. Godard gets sage advice from Roberto Rossellini (Laurent Mothe) in the run-up to making 'Breathless'; I can't corroborate whether this encounter ever happened, but Linklater drops in similar run-ins (like with Bresson shooting 'Pickpocket' in a Paris subway tunnel) that serve more to tell the story of the French New Wave, to capture its zeitgeist and energy, than a coherent by-the-books retelling. Which would be a drag, anyway, even as fastidious recreations of 'Breathless' movie moments might tell a different story. These French New Wave filmmakers, after all, were just running around Paris with cameras. Still, none were quite so making-it-up-as-they-went-along as Godard.
David Chambille's celluloid cinematography and a period jazz soundtrack immerse us in this world more than the features of 'Midnight in Paris' managed to, while Catherine Schwartz's editing moves us through the 'Breathless' production at a quick clip. But these elements may not, for a naive audience, successfully make the case for the brilliance of 'Breathless' and how its pulp and punch inform pretty much everything such a younger audience watches these days. Hopefully, 'Nouvelle Vague' encourages you to look back and watch 'Breathless' again — or for the first time — but Linklater's movie may inadvertently suggest, 'You could just watch this one instead.'
'Nouvelle Vague' premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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