‘Nouvelle Vague’ review: Richard Linklater dramatises the making of Godard’s ‘Breathless’

Dir: Richard Linklater. France. 2025. 105mins

Working virtually fully in French, Richard Linklater crafts a black-and-white movie shot in Academy Ratio across the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless. This affectionate homage to a slice of city French cool that has hardly ever been equalled can be a nostalgic tribute to a time and place of extraordinary inventive ferment and cinematic intercourse enchantment. 

A nostalgic tribute to a time and place of extraordinary inventive ferment 

Godard famously declared that movies will need to have “a starting, a center and an finish, however not essentially in that order”. This screenplay, by Holly Gent and Vince Palmo, ignores that final half to current what is basically a chronological account of the gestation, financing, manufacturing and enhancing of a low-budget movie which, as an finish title needlessly reminds us, is taken into account one of the crucial influential of all time. However that is additionally a narrative a couple of bunch of younger folks – amongst them Belmondo, Truffaut, Seberg and Godard himself – who grabbed the zeitgeist and lit it as nonchalantly as they might a cigarette.

Nouvelle Obscure will open in France in October, and the truth that will probably be launched with subtitles in non French-speaking territories (and there are prone to be many of those) will solely add to its retro enchantment – it’s unattainable to think about it being consumed some other means. Positive, it’s usually granular within the element of what went on day-by-day on the shoot, however its actual enchantment lies within the movie’s sense that Godard was a type of cinematic Bob Dylan, an inventive disruptor who seemed good in shades.

He’s performed by comparatively untried French actor Guillaume Marbeck, who doesn’t simply seem like the younger Godard however owns his mixture of conceitedness, irony and discretion, including a attraction that has not at all times been related to the auteur. Additionally combining lookalike credibility with soul and spark are Aubry Duillin as an affably laid-back Jean-Paul Belmondo and Zoey Deutch as Jean Seberg, the Hollywood star on whom producer Georges de Beauregard (performed right here by Bruno Dreyfurst) was persuaded to spend 1 / 4 of the movie’s finances. 

Exposition is aided by the new-wavish trick of presenting characters equivalent to Truffaut, Agnes Varda or Eric Rohmer through on-screen identify titles as they pause to look on the digicam. All had been a part of or near the editorial staff of Cahiers du Cinema, the movie journal which launched the New Wave and furnished most of its early administrators. Godard is miffed at being one of many final to make the leap however, on the similar time, he and we all know that every one you actually wanted to make a movie (a minimum of again then) is a lady, a gun and boundless confidence. Actually not a script.

The younger director’s strategy to the 20-day shoot is well-documented: he would write scenes and contours on the hoof and ship everybody dwelling for the day when he had run out of concepts. This exasperates Seberg, amuses Belmondo and infuriates the in any other case good-natured producer; it additionally fuels the wry comedian verve of an enterprise that’s introduced as half real need to make a masterpiece by tearing up the rulebook, half a type of punk rock provocation.

The script is possibly a bit too desperate to cram in each single bon mot Godard was recorded as delivering on set, every bit of recommendation given to him by mentors equivalent to Roberto Rossellini or Jean-Pierre Melville, and to re-enact each inventive resolution the crew discovered to get across the stretched finances – just like the mail cart lanky DoP Raoul Coutard (Matthieu Penchinat) crammed himself into in order that road scenes could possibly be shot with out passers-by realizing a movie was being made. However it by no means seems like a mere Wikipedia entry. David Chambille’s tactile cinematography drips with grain and environment – a high quality additional pushed by an era-appropriate soundtrack of cool jazz by Quincy Jones and others alongside dance classics like ’Hully Gully’.

Nouvelle Obscure by no means forgets that the time period which gives its title had nothing to do with cinema when it was coined. It referred to a brand new French wave of unbiased, assured younger individuals who acted like they owned the place.