Nouvelle Vague

Nouvelle Vague is Oscar-nominated director Richard Linklater’s love letter to the revolutionary magic of the French New Wave, reimagining the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, which ultimately cemented Godard as a pioneer of global cinema.

Review from Sight and Sound

A precedent has been broken. The omens for a movie about the making of À bout de souffle (1960) were not favourable: comparable projects like Hitchcock (2012) and Mank (2020), about the makings of Psycho (1960) and Citizen Kane (1941) respectively, have not endured; and to me at least the prospect of a film about the birth of the French New Wave out of the much-mythologised milieu of Cahiers du cinéma seemed unenticing.

To read some critics and historians you’d think that the French practically invented cinephilia: Truffaut, Godard, and the gang are commonly credited with seeing the worth in supposedly unsung Hollywood ‘auteurs’ like Nicholas Ray or even Hitchcock, and then making their own films in tribute. I assumed that this perspective would be faithfully reproduced on screen since it is so prevalent elsewhere, and – bluntly – because it is so flattering to American sensibilities. But I should never have doubted Richard Linklater, who has captured something unexpected while not stinting on the nostalgic pleasures that I had secretly wanted all along.

It plays to Linklater’s ability to forge an ensemble from a cast of near-unknowns, as he did to spectacular effect with Dazed and Confused (1993). Nouvelle Vague is a delight, even quite probably for viewers blessedly unversed in the mythology in which À bout de souffle is steeped, simply because it invites us to spend a few weeks in excellent company. At the core of it are Jean-Luc Godard (Guillaume Marbeck), his stars Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch) and Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin), and his very small crew: assistant director Pierre Rissient (Benjamin Cléry), director of photography Raoul Coutard (Matthieu Penchinat), and continuity supervisor (or ‘script girl’) Suzon Faye (Pauline Belle), plus Seberg’s husband François Moreuil (Paolo Luka-Noé).

Read the rest of the review from Henry K. Miller here...