Richard Linklater’s “Nouvelle Vague” is about the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s French New Wave classic, “Breathless” (1960).
Netflix carries both films as of Nov. 14, and I highly recommend watching Godard’s original first, then viewing Linklater’s take on how the film was made as an act of creative rebellion.
When we meet Jean-Luc Godard (Guillaume Marbeck) in Paris of the late 1950s, he’s a restless, arrogant and brilliant writer at Cahiers du Cinema and one of the few artists in the presence of filmmaker legends who has yet to make his first film. When money and opportunity finally arrive, Godard assembles a cast and crew but immediately irritates and challenges his collaborators with his unorthodox filming, writing and even in the way he takes days off.
Few recognize the brilliance of Godard’s anti-Hollywood, deconstructionist approach to making cinema, including his lead, Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch), the American actress who attaches herself to “Breathless” and immediately regrets it.
“Nouvelle Vague” is enjoyable and moves fast, though it never penetrates the inner life, motivations and defiance of Godard.
Tim Burton’s “Ed Wood” (1994) is still the best version of this kind of tale. For cinephiles who know about Godard’s body of work, I’d suggest that the tumultuous making of his “Contempt” (1968) and “King Lear” (1987) would have provided far more colorful and entertainingly chaotic making of period comedies.
The cinematography and art direction are uncanny at recreating the setting, as the clever touches that evoke the film style of the era, complete with “cigarette burns.”
Zoey Deutch’s best acting advice? Be “ready to be lucky.” Listen to our latest @InTheEnvelope episode where she discusses prep for Richard Linklater’s “Nouvelle Vague” and more: https://t.co/7F3ZRT58Zy pic.twitter.com/SdcFadGole
— Backstage (@Backstage) November 6, 2025
I enjoyed how every character is introduced quickly with a title card and shown facing the camera. It allows for movie history buffs to stargaze. Look, it’s Robert Bresson! Hey, it’s Francois Truffaut!! The actors look uncannily like their real-life counterparts, though only Deutch gets to fully explore her historical figure.
Having read more than a few texts on Godard, he is a tricky figure to pin down, to put it mildly. However, even the fantasy-infused “Hitchcock” (2012), with its divisive lead turn by Sir Anthony Hopkins and a goofy subplot with Ed Gein as a quasi-muse during the making of “Psycho” (1960), managed to probe its subject and not just resort to mimicry.
Marbeck’s take on Godard is always great fun to watch (yes, Godard was full of himself and frustrating, but also a genius and his instincts were correct), but we’re always on the outside looking in. It’s not the requirement of a film about Godard to definitively dissect the cinema icon but I figured Linklater, of all directors, would have been up to the challenge.
Yet, even though it falls short as a character study, “Nouvelle Vague” maintains its hold and entertainment value as a movie about the making of a real game changer.
I like Linklater’s film enough to recommend it, but I have one more caveat: the film needed an epilogue or even a closing title card establishing what happened once “Breathless” was released. Linklater’s film ends with the conclusion of the “Breathless” shoot but needed to go on.
The uninitiated may watch this and think Godard simply made this film as a goof on conventional filmmaking, but the truth is more profound: whether you like the man or not, Godard and his films, style, unusual methods to filmmaking and storytelling influenced everyone from Christopher Nolan, Quentin Tarantino, Spike Lee and Martin Scorsese, to name a small few.
New Wave Film, as a style and genre, may not be for everyone, but it changed the way many film artists made movies and thought about making them.
Funny enough, “Nouvelle Vague” is itself too conventional to be a true work of New Wave Filmmaking, but you know what movie is? Linklater’s “Before Sunrise” (1995) and the two sequels that followed it!
Linklater didn’t need to recreate the world of “Breathless” to demonstrate how he has already mastered the genre of film Godard created.
Three Stars (out of four)
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