Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague is a breezy love letter to Jean-Luc Godard, to Breathless, and to the irreverent ethos of the French New Wave. It’s less a museum piece than a hangout movie in period costume — curious about process, intoxicated by possibility and, crucially, intent on good vibes over grave pronouncements.
Linklater’s reenactment of the making of Breathless is an air kiss lived in — part behind a camera blog and part café society comedy — but it allows cinephile lore to breathe without becoming homework for those waiting with him.
A Playful Pilgrimage To The French New Wave
Set in Paris at the height of the New Wave, the movie follows ex-critics turned filmmakers associated with Cahiers du Cinéma and bears down on Godard (played with prickly charm by Guillaume Marbeck) as he hustles to put together his first feature. Zoey Deutch’s Jean Seberg is American cool with an edgy watchfulness; familiar names like François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, producer Georges de Beauregard and cinematographer Raoul Coutard circle the controlled chaos.
Shot in grainy black and white, framed in a boxy 4:3 ratio, and mostly performed in French, Nouvelle Vague summons the look and sound of its moment without feeling like cosplay. And instead of directly mimicking one of Godard’s most iconic tricks, Linklater frequently reveals where they’re coming from: the guerrilla setups on Paris streets, the improvised dialogue that would have to be dubbed later, the handheld in a rig disguised as a mail cart so the crew could steal shots without getting any permits.
The effect is to recast celebrated inventions as choices motivated by limitation, not a form of orthodoxy. Histories from the Cinémathèque Française and essays from the Criterion Collection have long said how Breathless’s jump cuts and freewheeling style grew out of necessity; Linklater’s scenes make that history tactile.
Linklater’s Hangout Sensibility Leads The Way
In all its cine-history, Nouvelle Vague flourishes best at the margins: pinballing between setups; talk idly about tomorrow’s pages; Seberg showing Jean-Paul Belmondo a loose-limbed step as the crew takes up a debate over lenses. This is Linklater land — the casual alertness of Dazed and Confused; the lazy linguistic lope of his Before movies; the bro-ey camaraderie of Everybody Wants Some!! — transposed to Left Bank haunts.
Marbeck’s Godard touches down as brilliant and amusingly exasperating, a man for whom sunglasses, cigarettes and philosophical monologues are all essential equipment.
The performance calls attention to something critics and colleagues have been repeating for decades: the blend of chutzpah and clarity that could transform a lack of money or time into a new grammar of cinema.
Linklater’s tone is admiring without being hagiographic. He allows Godard’s abrasiveness to be grating — especially with Seberg and the producer — but maintains a light temperature. The movie gets how a set can be like a band on tour: a temporary family, shared rhythm, constant in-jokes the glue between actual labor.
When Tribute Becomes A Checklist Of References
Occasionally, reverence edges toward reenactment. Sweeping through the breakneck shoot of Nouvelle Vague — which packs what recorded histories insist was a few frantic weeks into a span of 20 cinematic days — the film occasionally falls back on dutiful “how they pulled it off” anecdotes. You can feel the bullet points aligning: a shot under a street lamp, an encounter with an officer, a stroll down the Champs-Élysées.
These are catnip passages, to be sure, for buffs, but they do a bit to flatten the spontaneity that flows elsewhere through the movie. Linklater is strongest as a people-follower, not an icon-worshiper.
Context That Enriches And Grounds The Homage
But the film’s emphasis on joy doesn’t preclude the outsized footprint Breathless left behind. Godard won the Hanseatic Award for Best Director at Berlin (where the work was nonetheless greeted with boos), and its jump-cut syntax has echoed, as we all know, through film school curricula and BFI programming notes for generations. The influence of the movie is palpable in newer waves of montage in music videos and among TikTok-native editing rhythms — evidence that New Wave grammar continues to rewrite itself for fresh platforms.
Positioning the story at the New York Film Festival, a longtime champion of international auteurs, is a shrewd acknowledgement of how critics — and festivals — helped to canonize the movement.
And the fact that Nouvelle Vague actually is one of Linklater’s other recent artist-focused projects only further suggests his abiding interest in craft — how making turns to meaning.
The distribution path also matters. The wide streaming release can make New Wave lore accessible to viewers who’ve never so much as entered a rep house, an outreach regularly celebrated by outfits like the Film Foundation and the Criterion Channel for keeping film history in circulation.
Verdict: A Warm, Engaging Conversation With Godard
Nouvelle Vague is not a radical reinvention of Godard; it’s a vivid, congenial conversation with him. Fans will sink their teeth into the loving re-creations; newcomers have a cheery primer on why Breathless remains meaningful. There is Linklater compression in an age of invention and the glories of the meantime — those minutes on a set, in a café, when films and friendships tumble into being.
