Nouvelle Vague

NOUVELLE VAGUE   ***

Richard Linklater

2025

IDEA:  In 1959 Paris, young film critic Jean-Luc Godard decides to make his first feature film.

BLURB:  There are movies about filmmaking that depict the process as a lofty and labor-intensive undertaking, and there are those, such as Nouvelle Vague, in which one of the most seminal works of world cinema is jury-rigged in 20 half-days by a brash young director without a plan wrangling an exasperated cast and crew. Linklater could have glorified the making of Breathless, or dramatized its production as an unmitigated behind-the-scenes shambles, but instead he shows Godard as the kind of restive, inspired, but insouciant dilettante who drifted through his own first film, Slacker. Guillaume Marbeck is a dead ringer for JGL; permanently in his signature sunglasses and dragging on a cigarette, he has the director’s cadences, physicality, tireless intellect, and stubborn arrogance down to a T. Watching him orchestrate his vision, offhandedly and with an impish disdain for convention, one grasps Breathless as a lightning-in-a-bottle product of material contingency and impromptu, reckless invention. Even more than a chronicle of one particular director and film, however, Nouvelle Vague is an immaculate cinephilic recreation of a creatively fertile milieu, where Truffaut, Demy, Varda, Bresson, Melville, Rossellini, and sundry other luminaries brushed shoulders. David Chambille’s vintage lensing looks like it’s right out of the era, and the attention to antiquarian detail extends to the simulated optical subtitles and cue marks. Considering this aesthetic fidelity, it’s surprising Nouvelle Vague doesn’t mimic the radical formalism of Breathless or other New Wave films (not a single jump cut is used). Where the film does pay more direct homage is in the script’s bevy of quotations, which capture not only a distinctly Godardian intertextuality but create a playful, reverential dialogue between creators, from Leonardo to Godard to Linklater himself, who share a certain bug called art.