Nouvelle Vague isn’t so much about singing the praises of Breathless as it is about observing the compelling moment of its creation.
Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 classic Breathless is a film of grand importance and influence, which you might not know from watching Richard Linklater’s “making of” throwback Nouvelle Vague (or New Wave). Maybe that’s not such a bad thing. The Cannes 2025 competition title is slight in historical scope, but it makes for a delightful comedy-drama in the vein of Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!! and Dazed and Confused.
Whether or not Linklater reveres the French New Wave maestro seems irrelevant to the movie’s telling. He takes Godard’s ideas seriously without deifying the man, because Nouvelle Vague isn’t so much about singing the praises of Breathless as it is about observing the compelling moment of its creation. Save for a handful of effective close ups, there’s a distance between Linklater’s camera and the events as they unfold, which grants him permission to ape the outward texture of Breathless—black and white film stock, a 4:3 aspect ratio, and so on—if not its techniques.
For the uninitiated: Breathless broke new ground with its oblique aesthetic decisions, from lengthy walk-and-talks to jump cuts, though these have since become common visual parlance. Linklater’s own Before trilogy owes a huge debt to Godard, but rather than re-visiting this cinematic source code, the Texas native instead opts to craft a movie that feels entirely his own, with the rhythms of something with more classical (and more classically American) in its framing, editing and staging. Perhaps Godard would have balked at this depiction—Linklater’s fictional version of him (played by a resplendently fun Guillaume Marbeck) practically does—since the outsized influence of American cinema was a huge sticking point for the French legend, and a big reason Breathless exists at all. However, that Linklater’s homage doesn’t involve pale imitation is something of a relief. What could possibly live up?
The result is a hangout movie first and foremost, one that understands that while Godard went on to push the boundaries of cinema right up until his death, his directorial career began with a scrappy independent project that would’ve likely been fun and frustrating to those yet to be convinced of his genius. He was, after all, only 29 when he made his mark, a fact of which Nouvelle Vague never loses sight, with its litany of supporting characters playfully dressing him down.
The movie begins by introducing Godard alongside fellow New Wave enfant terribles Francois Truffaut (Adrien Rouyard), Suzanne Schiffman (Jodie Ruth-Forest) and Claude Chabrol (Antoine Besson), fellow critics for French magazine Cahier du Cinema, who all recently made their directing debuts.
