Nouvelle Vague (2025)

3 1/2 Stars (out of 4)

Take My Breath Away

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

For die-hard cinema buffs, Richard Linklater's Nouvelle Vague, crafted to look like a vintage French New Wave film, will be a pure pleasure, but some homework is required; there's not much here to invite newcomers in.

It's 1959 in Paris. Jean-Luc Godard (Guillaume Marbeck), a film critic at Cahiers du Cinéma, is starting to feel restless. His friend and co-worker François Truffaut (Adrien Rouyard) has just had a massive success with his debut feature The 400 Blows. He feels the only way to properly critique films is to make one himself.

Producer Georges de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfürst) lines up a sordid little crime tale and a small budget for Godard. He casts Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin) and American star Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch), and the filming begins, which is unorthodox at best. They use a light, hand-held camera with no sync sound. Godard does not provide a script, merely shouting the lines he wants the actors to say. And he shuts down for the day if he runs out of ideas.

Everyone thinks the finished movie will be a disaster. But perhaps Godard knows what he's doing?

Clearly a valentine to a lost era, Nouvelle Vague introduces to its many characters with printed titles, but even many of those will be unfamiliar to all but the most devoted scholars of the New Wave, such as script supervisor Suzon Faye (Pauline Belle), constantly butting heads with Godard over continuity, and Seberg's contractual makeup artist Phuong Maittret (Jade Phan-Gia). (The two women bond over their mutual frustration.)

The other New Wavers are here, including Cahiers du Cinéma co-workers Éric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, and Jacques Rivette, their pal Suzanne Schiffman, and other filmmakers or filmmakers-to-be: Jean Cocteau, Agnès Varda, Jean-Pierre Melville, Roberto Rossellini, Robert Bresson, etc. All of them are played by remarkable dead ringers, almost indistinguishable from the real people.

The drama is lean and spare, focusing largely on the nuts and bolts of this guerilla-type production. Much of the friction comes from Seberg, who has just worked with Otto Preminger on Saint Joan and Bonjour Tristesse and is dismayed by this ramshackle shoot. But she also brings spirit and bounce to things, bonding with Belmondo and responding to his unfettered brand of cool. (She teaches him a funny little dance in a couple of charming sequences.)

The movie intricately and with minute detail re-creates moments from the movie this is all leading up to, the 1960 masterpiece Breathless (a.k.a. À bout de souffle). Going into Nouvelle Vague without having seen Breathless is fairly pointless, but having an excuse to see it, again or for the first time, is always welcome.