‘Nouvelle Vague’ Review: Richard Linklater Prints the Legend of the French New Wave

A tribute to a film, a filmmaker, a style, an era, a wave, Nouvelle Vague plays like a love letter—if you like—from a distant son of that generation. Born in Texas in the same year Jean-Luc Godard shot the original À bout de souffle, Richard Linklater approaches this material not with grand philosophy or self-importance, but with modesty, affection and a cinephile’s curiosity. What the Boyhood director does here is recreate, with the precision of a carefully crafted, big-scale cosplay, the behind-the-scenes chaos of Breathless, set against a Paris vibrating with cultural energy at every corner.

Linklater’s film is a B-side to the making of Breathless, with the camera turned backwards, capturing the eccentricities, mania and bewilderment sparked by the then-radical shooting methods of a first-time director named Godard. But it all begins slightly earlier, framing the Swiss filmmaker within the ferment that shaped his generation: Cahiers du Cinéma. The recreation is so uncannily precise that you may wonder whether the actors have been inserted into restored archival footage—or conjured by some miracle of AI. They’re not. The production design is simply that meticulous, and aside from the obvious differences between the actors and the real figures they portray, the illusion often feels magical. To help viewers keep track of the dozens of characters, the film introduces everyone by their historical names, not by the actors’.

The opening could double as a cinephile joke: Godard, Truffaut and Chabrol go to see a bad French movie—the kind their generation despised and eventually dethroned. Through their conversations, their flirtations, their competitive wordplay, we settle into the moment. Chabrol has already made two films; Truffaut is on the brink of premiering The 400 Blows in Cannes—another landmark of the era, also recreated here; Rohmer and Rivette have their own work behind them. But the enfant terrible, Godard, still hasn’t made a feature. He’s done shorts, but as he himself says, shorts aren’t cinema—they’re anti-cinema. With his eccentric, self-assured personality, he struggles to persuade producers to back him. He finally convinces Georges de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfürst) by agreeing—falsely—to use the script he co-wrote with Truffaut, which he intends to discard the moment he starts shooting.

The film walks through every stage leading up to production, populated by period “stars” who will amuse the initiated. Godard (a spectacularly precise Guillaume Marbeck) brings in his soon-to-be icon Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin), his trusted cinematographer Raoul Coutard, and an American actress, Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch), who is far less accustomed to this kind of anarchic filmmaking. But the film’s core lies elsewhere—in the day-to-day chronicle of a director determined to break every rule of how movies were shot at the time. Godard believed, philosophically and instinctively, that cinematic truth could only be found by other means: no lights, handheld cameras hidden in improbable places, crossed axes, barely any retakes, and a stubborn faith that spontaneous inspiration should dictate the action.

So we watch him wrap a shooting day after two hours because he lacks an idea, or cancel another with a flimsy excuse, improvising constantly and reshuffling the schedule to everyone’s bewilderment. Seberg often shows up only to be sent home with nothing to shoot. Some collaborators take his whims with humor, others with irritation, and the producer eventually reaches a breaking point. Yet Godard—capricious, magnetic—always gets his way. Whether a real film existed inside those games, experiments, and half-written scenes was unclear; his team had no choice but to trust his instinct.

Linklater allows Godard to be the sophistic, rhizomatic thinker, the author of twisted, dazzling aphorisms, the man who writes about cinema while thinking it and making it (or vice versa). At the same time, he lets everyone else gently mock him and his lofty pretensions. The film remains light, fleeting and playful, never taking itself too seriously. It doesn’t aim to go beyond the mountains of scholarship already written about that film or that movement; instead, it aims to revive them—to drop viewers into that instant when Breathless was being made, in a Paris where you could bump into Bresson, Rossellini or Melville around any corner, all of them filming, all of them shaping a cinematic era.

When it comes to the actual history of the shoot, Linklater embraces the Fordian method: “print the legend.” Surely things were messier, and it’s well known that the friendships within that group grew far more tangled and dark in later years. But Nouvelle Vague captures them during their own Beatles-era—a moment when they seemed able to take on the world together, aligned in purpose and youthful bravado. And that fresh, spirited, slightly reckless energy is what Linklater celebrates—a filmmaker generous and self-effacing enough to place his own cinema at the service of his mentors and heroes.