Review: Catch the Nouvelle Vague

There’s a moment in Nouvelle Vague – Richard Linklater’s retelling of the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s À bout de souffle – that will resonate with everyone who has ever been a part of the film business. It’s when cinematic legend Roberto Rossellini (Laurent Mothe) visits the offices of seminal movie magazine Cahiers du Cinema, where he is treated as a minor deity. On his way out, he covertly pockets a handful of sandwiches.

Everyone from director to extra to journalist on a set visit (guilty as charged) has purloined some craft services for later, and that’s one of the panoply of details that makes Nouvelle Vague feel so real, so alive, so urgent. It’s also a moment that keeps Nouvelle Vague grounded. That’s essential, since this film could fall into ego-stroking or hagiography: Richard Linklater, who blew up the rules of filmmaking with Slacker, recounting how Godard blew up the rules of filmmaking with Breathless (to use the American title).

Such making-of biopics can often suffer from a certain reductionism, such as how Mank pulled its focus for the making of Citizen Kane almost impossibly tightly onto writer Herman J. Mankiewicz. Nouvelle Vague – written by Holly Gent and Vincent Palmo Jr. (Me and Orson Welles) – feels like the story of a scene, not a man. After all, Godard was the last of the Cahiers writers to get a feature made, and that’s burning him up. Truffaut, Rohmer, Chabrol, all real directors, and he’s still just a critic who made one short. Of course, À bout de souffle sparked a revolution but, as Linklater shows, that revolution was messy, self-contradictory, and rarely coherent.

Just as SNL origin story Saturday Night was a re-creation of a particular moment in New York City, Linklater perfectly repaves the streets of Paris in August 1959. His intention for his first black-and-white and first foreign language film was to create a movie that might have been crafted by one of Godard’s contemporaries and stuck in a closet for a few decades. He pulls it off so perfectly that you can positively smell the Parisienne smoke.

Much like the Lorne Michaels of Saturday Night, this Godard knows how he wants to make his movie, even if he can’t or won’t explain it to anyone – not cast, crew, or increasingly enraged producer Georges de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfürst) who rues the day he gave Godard his microbudget. Constantly lurking behind his trademark sunglasses, without script or shot list, and infuriating everyone around him, the director’s anti-method seems like chaos designed to enrage. Most furious of all is Jean Seberg (the excellently sly and sparky Zoey Deutch), the American ingénue who can’t resist name-dropping Otto Preminger as she badmouths le réalisateur Godard in her halting, Iowa-accented French.

But this isn’t simply a battle between a domineering director and a truculent actress. Linklater captures the enormity of even the smallest set, introducing each historical character with captions straight to camera. Amidst a universally excellent cast, special kudos to Matthieu Penchinat as nonplussed cinematographer Raoul Coutard, Aubry Dullin as future star Jean-Paul Belmondo (seemingly the only person on set to get Godard at all), and especially Benjamin Clery’s portrayal of Pierre Rissient, Godard’s beleaguered AD, as the patron saint of forbearance. Even in the smallest cameos, like how Roxane Rivière captures Agnès Varda’s bemused smirk, it’s arguably Linklater’s best use of an ensemble – and that’s saying something.

But great as each individual performance is, and broad as Linklater pulls his aspect ratio, Nouvelle Vague is really a close-up on Godard. The director could readily have become an enigma, an icon of cool with little interest in anything so prosaic as explaining himself. However, Marbeck subtly fills in the arrogance, the charisma, the despondency and genius of the man who changed cinema forever.

Nouvelle Vague opens for a limited theatrical run at AFS Cinema, iPic Austin, and Alamo Drafthouse Lakeline before debuting on Netflix on November 14.

This article appears in October 31 • 2025.