Jean-Luc Godard sets out to make his first feature and leave cinema forever changed in the new film from Richard Linklater.
Few filmmakers know what it’s like to be an outsider in the film scene beyond Hollywood than writer-director Richard Linklater; who debuted in 1991 with the plotless Texas-set cult classic Slacker, and then followed that with a string of films to revolutionize the possibilities of independent cinema like Dazed and Confused, the Before trilogy and the 2014 Best Picture nominee Boyhood. His second film this year after Blue Moon allows audiences to hang out with Jean-Luc Godard, arguably the greatest outsider of them all, in Nouvelle Vague, the results of which amount to one of the best films of the year for its filmmaking aesthetic, commitment to authenticity and a celebratory return to a time where les enfant terribles reigned supreme.
Taking place in France circa-1959, Nouvelle Vague follows Jean-Luc Godard (Guillaume Marbeck) during his stint as a film critic for the famed Cahiers du Cinema magazine, longing to make a feature film of his own upon his colleagues Francois Truffaut (Adrien Rouyard), Claude Chabrol (Antoine Besson), and Eric Rohmer (Côme Thieulin) having left journalism to make films of their own, with Truffaut’s debut The 400 Blows receiving acclaim at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival. After attending a screening of La Passe du Diable, Godard tells its director Georges de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfürst) not only that he didn’t like the film, but also that “the best way to criticize a film is to make one.”
From there, Godard teams with Chabrol and Truffaut on the script for what would be the revolutionary film A Bout de Souffle (aka Breathless), which is itself about a small-time crook named Michel trying to convince his girlfriend Patricia to move with him to Italy, while on the run himself after committing grand theft auto and murdering a police officer. Godard enlists de Beauregard to be the producer, and casts Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin) as Michel and American actress Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch) as Patricia, and proceeds to drive them all crazy with his confounding directions and rebellious decisions which imperil the production.
As alluded to earlier, Nouvelle Vague is remarkable for its dedication to authenticity. At the Biarritz Nouvelle Vague Festival in June, Linklater himself considered the French language ‘the sound of cinema’, and while Deutch’s French accent is far from perfect, the Austin-based legend’s ambition to shoot a film in a language not his own pays off wonderfully, further paired with a lovely replication of the French New Wave style of filmmaking, from the old look of black and white film stock from the time period and the unusually large film burns to introducing each character with standalone portrait shots of themselves at the start of a given scene.
Linklater also went the extra mile in making Nouvelle Vague by restricting himself to only using filmmaking techniques that his film’s subjects had at their disposal during their peak. This leads to a raw simplicity and intimacy in shot compositions that frame Godard in his element as an artist at work whether on set or alone in deep thought. Linklater’s latest also boasts a very funny script that pokes fun at Godard’s quirks while also using them for comedic effect, such as an early instance where the rebellious intellectual speaks a line from his upcoming article while pretending to type on a typewriter, and pitching Breathless to Jean-Paul Belmondo by jumping rope with him in the middle of the actor’s workout, still in his suit and sunglasses.
The humor of Nouvelle Vague also extends to the actors’ frustrations with Godard’s cryptic notes and how they work around the budding auteur, with examples coming when Seberg skips up to Belmondo just to audibly whisper what Godard told her in his ear to take advantage of the set’s lack of sync sound, and another scene where the film’s cinematographer Raoul Coutard (Matthieu Penchinat) takes cover in a covered wheelbarrow in order to shoot Breathless’ most famous scene without being conspicuous to the public. Moments like these evoke the inherent joy and camaraderie that came with the beautiful ease of making movies in that era.
It can be debated that Richard Linklater is keeping the hangout genre alive by himself, and Nouvelle Vague is very much in his wheelhouse. However, the film’s lackadaisical pace, little urgency and stakes may test the patience of casual viewers, and what’s also worth noting is that while Marbeck replicates Jean-Luc Godard’s emotional distance and enigmatic confidence well as the lead here, every third line of his is one of Godard’s famous quotes, which sometimes come off shoehorned to the point of feeling like Linklater is checking off a list of required lines.
But despite that, Linklater’s latest is all at once a poignant love letter to film’s first rebels in an epoch where movies were revered as an art form, a quietly powerful meditation on what independent filmmaking looked like in its infancy, and a hopeful encouragement to aspiring young filmmakers that today’s democratization of do-it-yourself moviemaking could bring us ever closer to another new wave of outlandish artists stepping up to challenge the corporate consolidated state of modern Hollywood. After all, as Godard himself said in the past and in Nouvelle Vague, one of 2025’s best films: “all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun.”