Nouvelle vague

Nouvelle Vague arrives as one of the most unexpected and fascinating entries in Richard Linklater’s career, and yet, in hindsight, it feels almost inevitable. Few American filmmakers have wrestled so consistently with time, with process, and with the joy of watching people simply exist on screen. Whether in the sun-dappled laziness of Dazed and Confused, the intellectual intimacy of the Before trilogy, or the audacious decade-long experiment of Boyhood, Richard Linklater has always been preoccupied with the moments before life-changing events fully reveal themselves. With Nouvelle Vague, he turns his camera toward Jean-Luc Godard, just before the critic-turned-director redefined cinema with Breathless in 1960. Rather than constructing a dry history lesson, Richard Linklater embraces the chaos, the comedy, and the accidental genius of those twenty feverish days in Paris, delivering a film that is as playful as it is reverent.

At its core, the film is less about Breathless itself than the fragile and combustible ecosystem that allowed it to be born. Richard Linklater stages his story in black-and-white, framed in the boxy 4:3 aspect ratio, not so much as a fetishistic mimicry of Godard’s style, but as a way of transporting the audience into the late 1950s without nostalgia or gloss. He is not attempting to remake Breathless, nor to explain away its mysteries. Instead, Nouvelle Vague feels like being invited into the room, or more accurately, into the café, where ideas are tossed back and forth with cigarettes dangling from lips and egos clashing over cheap wine. The rhythm is unmistakably Richard Linklater: characters walk, talk, argue, and linger, conversations looping in circles before stumbling into revelations. This is not a film obsessed with its “importance,” but with the texture of discovery itself.

The cast, for the most part composed of fresh French talent, is uncannily effective. Guillaume Marbeck’s Godard hides behind sunglasses and cigarettes, alternating between philosophical aphorisms and outrageous improvisations. He is magnetic and insufferable, a figure of both parody and admiration. Opposite him, Zoey Deutch delivers one of her finest performances as Jean Seberg, embodying both the starlet’s glamour and her mounting frustration with Godard’s improvisational chaos. Her skepticism is played not as ignorance but as pragmatism, and the push-pull between director and actress gives the film much of its comic energy. Aubry Dullin, meanwhile, practically resurrects Jean-Paul Belmondo with an uncanny resemblance and an infectious playfulness, embracing the madness as if it were a game. These three, in their dynamic, embody the contradictions of the New Wave: belief, doubt, and reckless abandon colliding on set.

What Richard Linklater captures so well is the sheer unlikelihood of it all. With producer Georges de Beauregard (played here by Bruno Dreyfürst) fretting over costs, with Raoul Coutard (brought to life by Matthieu Penchinat) pushing an improvised dolly made of a wheelchair, and with Godard writing scenes in cafés minutes before filming, everything about Breathless should have collapsed into obscurity. Instead, it became the spark that set modern cinema ablaze. Richard Linklater finds humor in the absurdity of this chaos, as when entire days are wasted without a single usable shot, or when continuity errors are dismissed as “part of reality.” There’s a knowing wink here: the audience already knows the legend that will emerge, and Richard Linklater’s delight is in showing just how impossible that outcome once seemed.

The screenplay, credited to Holly Gent, Vincent Palmo Jr., Laetitia Masson, and Michèle Pétin, is laced with cinephilic in-jokes, aphorisms, and philosophical banter that flirt with pretension but usually land with wit. Each historical figure is introduced with playful on-screen titles, in a style reminiscent of Wes Anderson, though less mannered. Cameos abound: François Truffaut (played by Adrien Rouyard) appears with the glow of Cannes success from The 400 Blows, while Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, Éric Rohmer, and even Agnès Varda drift in and out like ghosts of the movement to come. For cinephiles, these moments are irresistible, the equivalent of Marvel cameos for the Criterion set. Yet Richard Linklater never allows them to overwhelm the central drama; they remain seasoning, not substance.

If there is a criticism to be made, it is that the film is perhaps too gentle, too amused, to fully capture the radical danger of the New Wave. Where Godard’s cinema was abrasive, confrontational, and often politically charged, Richard Linklater opts for a breezy “hangout” tone, a comedy of artistic temperaments rather than a manifesto. Some will see this as a dilution of Godard’s legacy, a film that romanticizes chaos without interrogating it. And yet, there is an honesty in this approach. After all, Breathless was not conceived as a monument; it was made quickly, cheaply, and with little expectation of immortality. By focusing on the absurd, the frustrating, and the quotidian, Richard Linklater reminds us that revolutions rarely announce themselves as such in the moment.

There are moments of pure cinematic joy sprinkled throughout: the rehearsal of the Champs-Élysées scene, where Zoey Deutch’s Seberg tries to sell newspapers to passersby while bemused Parisians glance at the camera; Aubry Dullin’s Belmondo practicing his Bogart impression in a mirror; or Guillaume Marbeck wheeling a camera through a café on his makeshift dolly, colliding with chairs while muttering about “capturing truth.” In these instances, Nouvelle Vague achieves its most profound insight—that cinema is not just about what ends up on screen, but about the messy, human, sometimes ridiculous process that gets it there.

Ultimately, Nouvelle Vague is less a biography of Jean-Luc Godard than a celebration of possibility. It reminds us that the French New Wave was not born fully formed from the minds of geniuses, but from the clumsy, chaotic collaboration of young people daring to do things differently. For Richard Linklater, whose own career has been marked by quiet revolutions, from Slacker to Boyhood, this is a kind of kinship. He does not try to be Godard, nor to replicate his style. He simply honors the moment when cinema cracked open and, for a brief time, felt limitless.

As the credits roll, one feels both the exhilaration and the melancholy of history. Exhilaration, because Richard Linklater has bottled the giddy energy of creation. Melancholy, because no film, not even Nouvelle Vague, can recapture the shock of that first rupture. But perhaps that is the point. Revolutions can be remembered, studied, even reenacted—but they can never be repeated. Richard Linklater, wisely, does not attempt to reinvent Godard’s revolution. He simply invites us to share in the café chatter, the cigarette smoke, and the heady thrill of not knowing if what you are doing will matter, only that you must do it anyway. And in that, Nouvelle Vague finds its own quiet truth.

Nouvelle vague
Directed by Richard Linklater
Written by Holly Gent, Vincent Palmo
Adaptation and dialogue: Michèle Halberstadt, Laetitia Masson
Produced by Michèle Pétin, Laurent Pétin
Starring  Guillaume Marbeck, Zoey Deutch, Aubry Dullin
Cinematography : David Chambille
Edited by Catherine Schwartz
Production companies : ARP Productions, Detour Production
Distributed by ARP Sélection (France), Netflix (United States)
Release dates 17 May 2025 (Cannes), 8 October 2025 (France), 31 October 2025 (United States)
Running time : 105 minutes

Seen on September 12 2025 at the Deauville International Center

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