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Richard Linklater tries to capture a Breathless magic in his making-of drama Nouvelle Vague

The filmmaker's homage to Godard is pleasant and laudatory, but inherently lacks its subject's inventive energy.

Richard Linklater tries to capture a Breathless magic in his making-of drama Nouvelle Vague

The temptation to bring up Jacques Rivette’s maxim, that every film is a documentary of its own making, is too strong to deny when discussing Breathless. The poster boy for the French New Wave, Jean-Luc Godard made a debut that, even 75 years on, reveals a vast amount about its production and why it was significant while telling its jumpy, contemporary crime story. The shots feel stolen from Parisian streets; one can sense the crew crammed into bedroom corners, prompting the actors and inventing shots seconds before the camera starts rolling (or during, even). Every jump cut promises unseen minutes that Godard denies his audience; every line and shot borrowed from classic cinema reveals how Godard feeds on the genre, filtering it into a patchwork of moving image “truth” on his terms. This is to say, if Breathless so deftly proves Rivette right, why make a dramatized account of Breathless’ production and the culture that birthed it? Richard Linklater has been known to bite off more than he can chew, but still Nouvelle Vague doesn’t answer the contradiction at its heart—What can we possibly learn from this?—instead offering modest but compromised delight as a film-about-film dramedy.

Breathless is less interested in being pleasant; the 1960 film blends crime, philosophy, sex, and heartbreak into a compact tale of fugitive Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo, played here by Aubry Dullin) escaping to Paris and following up with a former American flame Patricia (Jean Seberg, played here by Zoey Deutch). Patricia is noncommittal, Michel is immature, and as the cops close in, passion and impulse set them on an inevitable, disorienting road towards destiny.

Rivette appears in Nouvelle Vague (played by Jonas Marmy), but he doesn’t lampshade the conceptual faults of Linklater’s film, just helps fill out a bit-part troupe of as many leading members of Euro cinema as possible. This includes François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Jean-Pierre Melville, Éric Rohmer, Robert Bresson, Roberto Rossellini, Jean Cocteau, and Agnès Varda; each offers some insight or advice to the impetuous Godard (Guillaume Marbeck) as he seeks to set himself apart from the pack and place himself into the cinematic canon with a single movie. No film school Easter egg can be missed: Like theatrical players, each character is introduced at the top of the scene, eyeballing the camera, with their names written neatly below. It’s part of Linklater’s cute and quirky imitation of the French countercultural style that nevertheless borders on parody in one scene where a Cahiers Du Cinéma meeting requires 20 names to be listed in sequence.

Oddly enough, these are some of the scenes in Nouvelle Vague that work best. Any time spent away from cameras rolling on Breathless (which includes the copious downtime Godard would insist on after shooting for two hours) are more sprightly and compelling, mainly because watching Marbeck, Dullin, and Deutch—all capable and game—pretend to come up with Breathless‘ most off-the-cuff golden streaks of creativity underlines the innately constructed nature of the story. As committed as Marbeck is, it’s not especially dramatic to watch a Godard impersonator explain his every innovation when the work itself is evidence enough of its complexity and power. Deutch throws herself into the part, but her imitation of Seberg’s introductory New York Herald Tribune scene threatens to lamely drown the whole film.

Linklater has cited Godard as a major influence on his work, but the hang-out mood that propelled his winning, modest slacker films in the ’90s indie boom and beyond does not really resemble the formally explosive, narratively rebellious films of Godard’s ’60s. Both directors could be described as impish, as rebelling against their conservative cultures, but Linklater’s most European-influenced films—the generation-spanning Before Trilogy—sport the melancholy and magic of Rohmer above anyone else. Still, Linklater is dedicated, on the surface, to his film of replication, appropriating Breathless‘ texture in lighting, film stock, and handheld compositions.

No, one won’t mistake it for a film made in 1960 through the stills alone (moments of digital tinkering, like era-appropriate traffic driving in the background of Parisian streets, stand out), but Linklater is primarily a director of performers rather than an imagemaker. Most of Nouvelle Vague‘s charm comes from Linklater’s playful but sincere commitment to conjure—in the texture of the frame and actors—how passionate and restless the spirit driving the New Wave was in late ’50s Paris.

The major, utterly compromising problem with Nouvelle Vague is that it is not written like Breathless. Asides from the fact that Breathless was not exactly “written” (70 pages of synopses and scribblings from Godard were just unveiled at Cannes; this is as close as the film got to a screenplay), the script for Nouvelle Vague by Holly Gent and Vincent Palmo Jr. (adapted into French by Michèle Pétin and Laetitia Masson) egregiously conforms to the soft, putty-like structure of filmmaker biopics: A jaded, yet-to-be discovered genius strains against filmmaking convention until they make the film that made them famous. The flatness of a biopic template versus the sharpness of the material it’s about is nothing new—Hitchcock is not as exciting as Psycho, and The Disaster Artist is not as funny as The Room—but Breathless is too distinct a statement and too dismissive of convention to be understood through such a didactic, slavish narrative approach.

Because Nouvelle Vague is a Richard Linklater film, with an ensemble of characters who run the gamut from glamorous to irritating to blunt to funny, much of the between-takes rapport and mini-spikes in production-related drama amuses on a scene-to-scene basis, but it fundamentally has to be framed and cut like a dialogue-driven Linklater project, not a livewire and unexpected formal experiment. The filmmaker’s adoration for the people on-screen is never in doubt, but as consistently pleasant as his Godardian homage may be, it has limited use as an evocation or understanding of the late master’s work.

Director: Richard Linklater
Writer: Holly Gent, Vincent Palmo Jr., Michèle Pétin, Laetitia Masson
Starring: Zoey Deutch, Guillaume Marbeck, Aubry Dullin
Release Date: May 17, 2025 (Cannes)

 
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