Review: Linklater’s ‘Nouvelle Vague’ is an easygoing ode to cinematic oddballs
2025 / Dir. Richard Linklater
☆ 3.5/5
Watch if you like: Breathless, American Movie, The Disaster Artist, or if you went through a massive French New Wave phase when you were 19.
“Art is not a pastime, but a priesthood,” Jean Cocteau says to Jean-Luc Godard (Guillaume Marbeck), who is currently distressed that he is the last of the major writers at the film journal Cahiers du Cinéma to make a feature-length film. As the audience we know that he, as depicted in Richard Linklater’s latest film, Nouvelle Vague, will soon direct and forever change cinema with Breathless. But that doesn’t mean it won’t be a ridiculous ride to get there.
This is somehow Marbeck’s first film role despite playing Godard like a veteran character actor who finally got a break in a quirky indie. His Godard is a comical figure, knowing he’s both the most intelligent person in the room and potentially a total failure if he can’t make a real movie (shorts are anti-cinema, he says).
After Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows became a massive success after Cannes, Godard could ride his coattails, convincing a producer friend to back a Truffaut treatment for him to direct (the producer tells him to make a straightforward film noir out of it). Truffaut’s success also allows him to rope in the starlet Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch), who’s fresh off a contract with the tyrannical Otto Preminger and hoping to work with Truffaut or Claude Chabrol, but convinced by her husband to settle for Godard.
While a relatively easygoing film, the tension between the experienced actress Seberg and Godard drives the film. Godard starts without a script, literally making it up as he goes along, if he’s not taking a day off to play pinball. Every part of the filmmaking process is completely unconventional and bewildering to the small crew, even as Godard’s oddball antics do inevitably draw/trauma bond them in. This is where Nouvelle Vague can resemble films like The Disaster Artist or American Movie, which are about other odd characters that don’t know what they’re doing. Of course, Tommy Wiseau unintentionally broke every rule while making The Room, while Godard knowingly shattered them with a sledgehammer.
Linklater has affectionately been drawn to outsiders since his own film Slacker broke new ground for American independent cinema in the 1990s, so it makes perfect sense why he would craft such a loving tribute to one of his cinematic icons. That’s easy to see in the lavish recreation of 1959 Paris and a cinematic look that mirrors the time period, even if it eschews much in the way of cinematic rule-breaking apart from a quick breakout each time a new character is introduced.
The lack of significant stakes, surprises, or its own unique cinematic language won’t catapult Nouvelle Vague into the same cinematic canon it’s inspired by. At the same time, not trying to make a grand statement and giving us a low-key Linklater period hangout movie is its own type of cinematic treat, like having a dessert after the meal that is Breathless. Leaving the theater, I’d also found a renewed appreciation for the French New Wave and a desire to dig back into these films that had made such an impact on me in my early twenties.