THE STORY – Follows the shooting of “Breathless,” the first feature film of the Nouvelle Vague era of French cinema, in 1960
THE CAST – Guillaume Marbeck, Zoey Deutch, Aubry Dullin, Bruno Dreyfürst, Benjamin Clery, Matthieu Penchinat, Pauline Belle, Blaise Pettebone, Benoît Bouthors, Paolo Luka Noé, Adrien Rouyard & Jade Phan-Gia
THE TEAM – Richard Linklater (Director), Holly Gent & Vincent Palmo Jr. (Writers)
THE RUNNING TIME – 105 Minutes
It’s perhaps a fool’s errand to attempt to recreate the electric energy of the earliest films of the French New Wave, the innovation-forward French film movement birthed from the critics of the Cahiers du Cinéma. These films laid the foundation for many of the cinematic techniques and tricks that seem de rigueur today, none more so than Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless” from 1960. “Breathless” basically rewrote the rules of cinema, feeling completely different from everything that came before. Given its importance, it was perhaps inevitable that someone would try their hand at making a film about the making of “Breathless” one day, though, and who better to do so than Richard Linklater, the Texan auteur whose ultra-low-budget classic “Slacker” essentially kickstarted the independent cinema movement of the 1990s?
Thus, we have his 2025 Cannes Film Festival Competition entry “Nouvelle Vague” – or “New Wave” in English – a stylish, playful film about the making of a stylish, playful film. In true Linklater fashion, he manages to get a loose, improvisational quality out of a very obviously written screenplay. While this doesn’t truly match the style in which Godard made “Breathless,” it works well enough for this film, especially since Holly Gent and Vince Palmo’s dialogue contains plenty of laugh-out-loud dialogue exchanges between the characters. Godard, along with many other French New Wave directors, was a film critic before he was a filmmaker, and the film revels in his holier-than-thou gravitas, tossing out precepts and philosophies on filmmaking with abandon, each one funnier in context than the last. Context is key here, as the film doesn’t merely regurgitate Godard’s most famous quotes but has fun with relating them to “Breathless” and just how paradigm-shifting it was in both form and production.
The production of “Breathless” makes up the bulk of the film. Godard, embarrassed that he’s the last of his Cahiers crew to make a feature film (“short films are anti-cinema,” and he hilariously says at one point, referring to his previous work), finally gets his chance after producer Georges de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfürsft) agrees to fund the production of a treatment written by François Truffaut (Adrien Rouyard) after his film “The 400 Blows” premiered to a rapturous response at Cannes. Based on a newspaper article about Michel Portail, who stole a car to visit his sick mother and ended up killing a motorcycle cop, and his American journalist girlfriend, Beauregard thinks he’s getting a sexy film noir. Still, Godard has a vision of how to make cinema and will not compromise that vision for anyone or anything. Not Beauregard, not his famous American star Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch), not his cameraman Raoul Coutard (Matthieu Penchinat), nor any of the people working on set or in the editing room. No one has made a film this way yet, but Godard is too sure of himself to hear the word “no,” leading to numerous creative clashes that always work out in his favor.
The difficult artistic genius is one of cinema’s oldest stock characters at this point, but Guillaume Marbeck so thoroughly inhabits Godard’s skin that he transcends cliché. His uncanny resemblance to Godard aside, he matches the director’s speech patterns without sounding like he’s trying to perform an impression of the man. He embodies the auteur’s rebellious spirit and self-assured air in a way that takes the piss out of the icon just enough for you to understand why everyone working on “Breathless” puts up with him without any guarantees that the film is going to work out. Coming from his mouth, his simply-spoken philosophies on cinema and making it seem self-evidently true, and not just from the vantage point of 2025. Marbeck’s bone-dry delivery heightens the humor of many of the script’s laugh lines, and one scene in which Godard visits his leading man, Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin), at a boxing gym provides a showstopping moment of physical comedy. Playing someone as iconic as Jean-Luc Godard should be impossible, but Marbeck makes it look as natural as breathing.
Thankfully, the film treats the rest of its cast of characters with just as much respect as it does Godard. Every single icon featured gets their own introductory title card, and each is played by someone with a striking physical resemblance to their real-life counterpart, making the film even more fun for cinephiles. Zoey Deutch is uncanny as Seberg, nailing the actress’s American French accent and building a flirtatiously friendly relationship with Dullin, who’s a laidback blast as Belmondo. He gets the film’s funniest moment, flailing about in the streets, dying on camera while telling the horrified onlookers not to worry; it’s all for film. As the taciturn Coutard, whose dialogue mostly consists of saying “rolling” and “cut,” Penchinat makes the most of his long, weathered face for giggle-inducing reaction shots as the perpetually put-upon cameraman forced to crouch inside a covered box on wheels in order to shoot on the streets without anyone knowing. The Cahiers group, which also includes Jodie Ruth-Forest as Suzanne Schiffman, all have a playfully antagonistic rapport with each other that includes them complimenting each others’ films by saying things like “everyone will hate it,” and “it’s no ‘Citizen Kane.’”
Strong as the performances and dialogue are, the film’s playful spirit and period stylings leave the biggest impression. Watching Godard send everyone home from a day of shooting after only a couple of takes because he’s hungry and can’t think of anything else to do is a kick to watch, and cinematographer David Chambille recreates the look of traditional French films from the late ‘50s and the New Wave alike with accuracy while avoiding feeling cliché. The pops and hisses on the soundtrack and black spots signaling a reel change are familiar signifiers. Still, when paired with seeing the crew dance in the iconic café from Godard’s 1964 masterpiece “Band of Outsiders,” the film somehow transcends mere tribute. Linklater isn’t recreating the old French style so much as he is having a dialogue with it, trying to bottle up some of that energy and bring it to the present day.
However, while the film’s playful qualities make it a lot of fun to watch, it can’t recapture the lightning in a bottle that made “Breathless” so special. Linklater and his crew seem more focused on recreating the world that led to the creation of the New Wave than the never-before-seen quality of the cinematic revolution “Breathless” that helped kick off. Perhaps trying to do that in 2025 would be impossible – what could you possibly do with the cinematic form after sixty-plus years of innovation since “Breathless” that could inspire the same feelings in an audience as those startling jump cuts did in 1960? – but without that kind of electricity, “Nouvelle Vague” ultimately never feels like more than a breezy time with cinematic icons. That’s a perfectly noble goal, but when you’re making a film about the making of one of the greatest films ever made, it can’t help but feel like a bit of a disappointment, no matter how much fun it is to watch.
