Richard Linklater's Breathless Tribute Nouvelle Vague Is an Inside Baseball Movie for Everyone

Time​ Magazine

18-05-2025

Some days it seems we live in a horrid world where the majority of humans couldn't give a fig about art. How many people in that world are going to care about a 66-year-old black-and-white movie—one that, for anyone who doesn't speak French, requires the reading of subtitles?
Yet here comes a comet: Richard Linklater's sensational Nouvelle Vague, an agile, witty, elegant picture about the making of a movie that possibly only film lovers and bona fide old people care about— Jean-Luc Godard's cannon-shot of a debut, 1959's Breathless —may end up being appreciated by only about 2.6 percent of the general population. Who would make a picture like that? Only someone who cares. Nouvelle Vague, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on May 17, is the ultimate inside-baseball making-of movie. But even more than that, it's a picture that stands strong on the side of art, of history, of working to solve the puzzle of things that maybe at first you don't fully understand. It's both a shout of joy and a call to arms. It's all about the bold, muscular act of caring.
Jean-Luc Godard was just 29 when he made À bout de souffle —the movie that would come to be known among English-speakers as Breathless —and yet he felt he was lagging behind his peers at Cahiers du Cinéma, the movie journal whose critics became, almost magically, some of the era's greatest filmmakers. Critics as filmmakers? Beware: it's a lousy idea. Yet Godard's Cahiers colleague François Truffaut had already made The 400 Blows, a picture Godard loved, and envied. Ambitious, bratty, and brilliant in a playing-behind-the-beat way, Godard wanted to make his own movie. But who would give him the money?
Nouvelle Vague tells the story of how the enigmatically charming yet sort-of-a-jerk Godard—played, marvelously, by Guillame Marbeck—wheedled his way into making Breathless, shot in just 20 days, guerrilla-style, largely on the streets of Paris. He already had ideas for several films, and in an early scene, he pitches them excitedly to producer Georges de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfürsft). But Beauregard will hire him only if he shoots a script that Truffaut (played here by Adrien Rouyard) has already written. That script, inspired by a real-life story Truffaut had seen in the newspaper, followed a raffishly alluring French layabout, Jean Paul Belmondo's Michel Poiccard, who steals a car, shoots a cop, and is ultimately betrayed by his American journalist girlfriend, Jean Seberg's gamine femme fatale Patricia Franchini.
Godard gets to work finding his cast. He wants his friend Belmondo (Aubry Dullin) to play Michel: he goes to the boxing gym where the amiable, loose-limbed actor is working out, joining him in a jump-rope session as he makes his pitch. Can he get Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutsch), already a star, to play Patricia? Boldly, he makes his move, first approaching her husband, François Moreuil (Paolo Luka-Noe), who's managing her career. She doesn't like the idea: she doesn't want to work with this newcomer; she thinks the whole thing will come crashing down; and even after shooting begins, she threatens to quit. Somehow, she sticks with it, at times following Godard's capricious lead but just as often challenging him. He finds a DP he likes, the gentle giant Raoul Coutard (Matthieu Penchinat). There's a persnickety script girl, Suzon Faye (Pauline Belle), who tries to tell her boss Godard that for continuity's sake, he can't remove a cup from a table in one of the small flats the crew has commandeered as a set. 'Reality is not continuity!' he says, just one of the many bossy, spontaneous, maddeningly delightful pronouncements he will make as he and his friends—all of them under 30, most of them with virtually no idea what they're doing—launch into the adventure of making a moving picture.
Don't know who any of these real-life characters are, or what they look like? Linklater's got you. He has filled his cast largely with unknowns, seeking actors who closely resemble their real-life counterparts; most of these aren't faces you'll recognize, playing people from the past you may never have heard of. But Linklater introduces each player with his or her name neatly emblazoned at the bottom of the screen, similar to the way characters (and often the actors playing them) used to be identified in silent movies, so audiences could get their bearings quickly. It's easy to follow along, and before you know it, you're surfing this nascent New Wave with the people who helped create it, held aloft by the buoyancy of Godard and his ramshackle—yet perfectly chosen—team of accomplices.
Godard would start each day of shooting with fresh ideas. When he ran out of them, sometimes after shooting only one or two scenes, he'd quit for the day. Some days, on a whim, he'd call off shooting altogether, causing Beauregard to materialize seemingly out of nowhere in an understandable huff. To shoot on the street without attracting attention, they obtain a postal cart and put the camera—as well as Coutard—inside. Every five minutes or so, Godard blurts out a favorite aphorism. You may already know some of them, like 'All you need for a movie is a girl and a gun.' But so many of them flow from his lips that they become a running gag. He quotes Gaugin ('Art is either plagiarism or revolution'), Duke Ellington ('I don't need time, I need a deadline'), Leonardo Da Vinci ('Art is never finished, only abandoned'). Marbeck, peering out at the world through dark glasses, shaking his pipe at his cast and crew as he spins out his sometimes puzzling directives, captures the impish magnetism of the young Godard. You want to slug him; you also adore him.
And to watch him, his cast, and his friends make this thing—a movie we freely call a masterpiece, though that's too snoozy a word for the blast of cool energy that is Breathless —is a particular kind of bliss. Nouvelle Vague is filled with lore: Godard has hired a stuntman to film a somewhat complex scene in which a pedestrian is hit by a car. In the end, he decides to shoot just the aftermath of the accident, getting his friend and fellow filmmaker Jacques Rivette (Jonas Marmy) to lie down in the street and play dead. Deutsch, with her ragamuffin-chic blond pixie cut, is a perfect Seberg. To hear her speak in French, perfectly capturing the way Seberg's dang-flat midwestern vowels insinuated themselves even in that most beautiful of languages, is a delight unto itself. (Seberg was born in Iowa, though she's buried where she belongs, in Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris.) And as Belmondo, Dulling gives a performance of spectacular physicality, whether he's scrambling in his pocket for chicken feed to buy a small café meal, or, after being shot, staggering and stumbling down a Paris street in a half-tragic, half-funny promenade, with Godard and his camera crew trailing behind. Watching Breathless, we see Belmondo's jagged ballet from behind. In Nouvelle Vague, we see Dullin-as-Belmondo's face as he swerves and zigzags toward his demise. Passers-by look alarmed; he tells them not to worry. 'It's for a movie!' he says cheerfully, channeling the essence of Belmondo's rubbery charm.
Nouvelle Vague was filmed in Paris, but required extensive digital-effects work to make it look accurate for the period. This is filmmaking as leap of faith: Nouvelle Vague may seem glowingly modest, but unlike Breathless, it couldn't be made on the cheap. At the same time, its layers of details are gorgeous and priceless. Pascaline Chavanne's costumes, especially Seberg's wardrobe of minute cardigans and jaunty silk scarves, strike every note perfectly. (And I'm dying to know what Derek Guy, the eminently knowledgeable wag behind the social-media account Die Workwear!, will think of Marbeck-as-Godard's gently rumpled jackets and scuffed-just-right loafers.) Cinematographer David Chambille gives the images a lustrous, pearly depth. The soundtrack is a buffet of rapturous period jazz, some of it silky, some of it vibrating with skittery energy, much like Martial Solal's score for Breathless itself. You'll hear songs you maybe don't know, like Zoot Sims' version of 'My Old Flame,' and if this is the first time it reaches your ears, I envy you the discovery.
Cannes is obviously the place to premiere a movie like Nouvelle Vague. That 2.6 percent of the population that cares about Breathless? Ninety-eight percent of them are here. But from things he's said about the film, it seems Linklater doesn't think of it as niche. And really, isn't that the only way to go? According to the movie's press notes, when an apprehensive financing executive asked him who he thought this film was for, he said, 'Like all my films, this one is for young people.' It is, after all, about young people making their first movie. He said that if he did his job right, young people would walk out of the theater thinking, 'I can do this too! In fact, I'm going to do it!'
But even if you will never in your life pick up a movie camera, Nouvelle Vague is film as invitation—the best kind of film. If you don't know Breathless —what are you waiting for? And if you do know it—even if you've seen it a dozen or a hundred times— Nouvelle Vague will make you see it anew. Is there a difference between loving a movie and being in love with one? Maybe the distinction is subtle. But when a movie that makes you want to weep with joy, you know something is happening. There's no resisting the gangster of love.