An older couple congratulates producer Georges de Beauregard on the success of his magnificent new film — politely interrupting young Jean-Luc Godard, who has been telling him that it’s dégueulasse, a load of shit. Possibly not the best way for an aspiring filmmaker to ingratiate himself with a producer, but Godard was never one for biting his tongue. Here, director Richard Linklater stages the generational rift that would inspire Godard and his fellow cinephile-critics at Cahiers du cinéma to take up arms against la qualité française — François Truffaut’s term for the polished, unimaginative literary adaptations that represented the old guard and, as they saw it, plagued French cinema. They would do so first with charged polemics on the pages of Cahiers, then with films of their own.
It’s 1959, and Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague begins by reminding us that Godard was lagging behind — the last of the Cahiers crowd to make a feature. Stealing money from the magazine’s office, Godard (newcomer Guillaume Marbeck) zips over to Cannes to catch the premiere of The 400 Blows and decides it’s now or never. With a treatment from Truffaut (Adrien Rouyard), Godard convinces producer de Beauregard — “Beau-Beau,” as he’s affectionately nicknamed — to take a chance on Breathless. Beau-Beau brings on board cameraman Raoul Coutard (Matthieu Penchinat) and a host of skeptical crew members. The actors are unlikely leading man Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin) and Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch), unlikelier still for the fact that she’s an actual Hollywood star.
Nouvelle Vague unfolds as a breezy, day-by-day account of the shoot, a series of scenes in which the perennially cryptic Godard springs surprise after surprise on his cast and crew. There will be no script, no sync sound, no regard for continuity. Some days, Coutard is bundled into a post trolley to get a shot of a busy Parisian street; others, Godard calls time after a few hours because he’s run out of ideas. There is always some problem driving someone mad — usually uptight Beau-Beau, who at one point gets into a fistfight with Jean-Luc after catching him skiving off at a café with a pinball machine.
The visual style of Linklater’s film successfully evokes Breathless’ own — black-and-white, 1.33:1 aspect ratio, even affectations like end-of-reel cue marks — while stopping short of outright pastiche. Linklater adds his own touches; in one self-reflexive scene, Godard pushes Raoul around in a wheelchair, and this makeshift camera dolly performs a dance with that of Linklater’s cinematographer David Chambille. Throughout, each lookalike is introduced with a to-camera portrait and a captioned name: Claude Chabrol, Éric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, Roberto Rossellini, Jean-Pierre Melville… the list goes on and on. (The fact that these are likely to make one think of Wes Anderson before Godard shows just how deeply the latter’s influence has been absorbed.) The deluge of references quickly becomes tiresome; the film starts to resemble a Marvel movie, rewarding viewers for having the requisite knowledge to recognize names, locations, behind-the-scenes photographs being recreated. There’s Jacques Demy and Agnès Varda! And over there — it’s Robert Bresson, filming Pickpocket on the Métro!
The same film-trivia logic reduces Godard himself to caricature. His dialogue is drawn almost entirely from his various writings: he will denounce short films; he will declare that all you need is a girl and a gun. This is admittedly a comedy, and one doubts Linklater and his co-writers (Holly Gent and Vincent Palmo) literally believe Godard spoke exclusively in aphorisms. But their unwillingness to look for cracks in his curated public persona means Nouvelle Vague tells us little that Godard’s own films haven’t already told us. Critics turned up their noses at Michel Hazanavicius’s Le Redoutable — heresy, to make a film that poked fun at Godard’s response to May ’68 — but at least that film tried to say something about Godard the man away from the camera.
“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal,” Godard quotes Eliot. But then again, he smiles, Gauguin: “In art one is either a plagiarist or a revolutionary.” It’s as if Linklater is leaving the loaded gun for the critic: you, Linklater, are a mere plagiarist. In admitting his theft, he hopes for absolution. But if Linklater’s argument is that what happened behind the scenes was as subversive as the finished film — shoot fast, follow your instincts, tear up the rules — then Nouvelle Vague is a simulacrum of an early Godard film in every way but those that matter. It disrupts nothing, on or off camera. The only reason this bears complaint is that once upon a time Linklater, like Godard, could synthesize his influences into films that were, if not revolutionary, at least forward-looking — films in which, say, the passage of time could be used as raw material.
If we’re long past la qualité française — past even its more recent American analogue “Oscar bait” — the festival prestige circuit still suggests its own ossifying trends: adaptations now expanded to encompass IP, A24-adjacent stylistic homages, the endurance of the biopic-industrial complex. Check, check, and check. What the New Wave once derided as cinéma de papa has become the cinema of the algorithm — a system that rewards recognition over surprise, citation over invention. Nouvelle Vague will have a brief theatrical run before landing on Netflix; fin de cinéma indeed.
DIRECTOR: Richard Linklater; CAST: Guillaume Marbeck, Zoey Deutch, Aubry Dullin, Alix Bénézech; DISTRIBUTOR: Netflix; IN THEATERS: October 31; STREAMING: November 14; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 46 min.
Published as part of London Film Festival 2025 — Dispatch 4.
Comments are closed.