Nouvelle Vague

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

original cast in 1960

Director Richard Linklater

Linklater at Cannes with Guillaume Marbeck and Zooey Deutch

Linklater with Guillaume Marbeck

NOUVELLE VAGUE           B+                                                                                             France  USA  (106 mi)  2025  d: Richard Linklater

Each film is made up of five different films: The film you write, the film you cast, the film you shoot, the film you edit, and the film you release.                                                                        —Roberto Rossellini (Laurent Mothe)

A movie about making movies, Richard Linklater takes us back to a date in history when the French New Wave originated with the introduction of this seemingly unimpressive, non-traditional cinematic technique that would revolutionize the way low-budget, independent films would be made in the future.  This is a Who’s Who of all the players surrounding the making of Breathless (À Bout de Souffle) (1959), with critic Pauline Kael writing that the film “gave young people the idea that they could make movies on their own, that film could be as personal as a poem or a painting,” where the many names are name-dropped, with the audience actually more familiar with the historical characters they are playing rather than the largely unknown modern day actors in the roles.  Shot in Paris on 35mm using the black and white aesthetic of the New Wave, working in French for the first time, with an all French crew, Linklater has a blast recreating the chic cool of what went on behind the scenes during the making of the film, using a jazzy piano and sax score with plenty of relatively unknown musical juke box songs thrown in, where the mix of playfulness and existential anxiousness at changing the entrenched movie traditions felt to the actors more like a home movie than anything audiences would ever want to see.  Yet this really does offer a you-were-there moment in time, filled with all the ambition and terror at what they were attempting to create, throwing away all the established rules, making this a fly by the seat of your pants project.  While this is in no way a film made in the style of Godard, it is instead a unique approach by Linklater, who is himself a self-taught filmmaker, to recreate the times in which it was made, where it’s especially interesting to see all the heavy hitters surrounding him, with name cards identifying each and every one of them, from his fellow Cahiers du Cinéma film critics turned filmmakers, François Truffaut (Adrien Rouyard), Jacques Rivette (Jonas Marmy), Claude Chabrol (Antoine Besson), and Éric Rohmer (Côme Thieulin), magazine film critics who became some of the era’s greatest filmmakers, with appearances by recognizable directors Robert Bresson (Aurélien Lorgnier), Agnès Varda (Roxane Rivière), Jean Cocteau (Jean-Jacques Le Vessier), Roberto Rossellini (Laurent Mothe), and Jean-Pierre Melville (Tom Novembre), with other major players behind the scenes like producer Georges de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfürst), assistant director Pierre Rissient (Benjamin Clery), cinematographer Raoul Coutard (Matthieu Penchinat), make-up artist Phuong Maittret (Jade Phan-Gia), screenwriter Suzanne Schiffman (Jodie Ruth-Forest), who worked with Rivette and Truffaut, and a healthy dose of others.  We’ve seen this before in the energetic exuberance of Christophe Honoré’s love letter to the French New Wave in DANS PARIS (2006), where this is another tribute to the Nouvelle Vague, which was a collaborative effort for all those involved, like a family, with Linklater creating a playful portrait of some of the immortals of French cinema, a tight-knit community of film fanatics who live, eat, and breathe cinema, but certainly part of the beauty for casual viewers and cinephiles alike is the constant in-jokes and references to other films.  Prone to endless quotations, like Jean Cocteau, “Art is not a pastime, but a priesthood,” T.S. Eliot, “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal,” Paul Gaugin, “Art is either plagiarism or revolution,” Duke Ellington, “I don’t need time, I need a deadline,” or Leonardo Da Vinci, “Art is never finished, only abandoned,” while also adding his own, “Disappointments are temporary, film is forever.”  Godard is an extremely literary filmmaker, characterized by a “collage-like profusion of quotes and allusions,” (Jean-Luc Godard Was Cinema's North Star), fond of blending high and low-brow references, subverting traditional storytelling, or using cinematic form to explore themes as if it were a literary work, especially later in his career, using complex ideas in a way that parallels literary essays, yet in his first film, no one knew who he was or what to expect, having little respect for his innovative yet peculiar working methods on the set.

One of two films Linklater premiered this year, both extremely personal examinations of intensely eccentric artists, yet imagined in very different ways, the other being songwriter/lyricist Lorenz Hart in Blue Moon (2025), each allowing viewers to soak in the era, the people, and the atmosphere, literally living alongside these creative forces and sharing intimate moments, yet this is the more playfully fun of the two, and is a delight from start to finish.  As to the birth of the French New Wave, an argument was made by Georges Sadoul, a noted French journalist and film historian, that Agnès Varda’s LA POINTE COURTE (1955) was actually the first film of the French New Wave, edited by Alain Resnais, shot in her mother’s hometown of Sète, a small fisherman’s village in the south of France, inhabited by her love and knowledge of paintings, literature, and poetry, poking fun at herself through art, yet the release date overseas came long afterwards.  Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows (Ascenseur pour l'échafaud) (1958) had a significant impact on Godard, as did François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups) (1959), another eye-opening influence, which the Cahiers crew are seen watching near the beginning, instantly garnering international praise, while more quietly made in a similar style was Éric Rohmer’s The Sign of Leo (Le signe du lion) (1959), which failed at the box office.  Other early contenders are Claude Chabrol’s social realist film BEAU SERGE (1958), a naturalistic rural drama that was refused entry at Cannes, and Les Bonnes Femmes (1960), a deceptively complex and deeply disturbing work that on the surface appears to be a freewheeling, light-hearted drama about the social patterns of young Parisian girls, shot in a near documentary style following events as they occur over the course of several days, premiering at the Cannes Film Festival in 1960 at the same time as Godard’s BREATHLESS, which catapulted into an overnight sensation, literally exploding onto the scene, forever associated with the birth of the French New Wave.  Originally the term may have been more of an attitude than a film movement, coined by journalist Françoise Giroud in 1957 to describe a new generation of young French filmmakers and a youth movement in French society (FRENCH NEW WAVE HISTORY).  With a casting process that took more than six months, the heart of this film is capturing the early, irreverent spirit of Godard (Guillaume Marbeck), seen in his everpresent dark glasses, even indoors when watching movies in a darkened theater, almost always with an indispensable cigarette, so he stands out, becoming a deliberate part of his public persona, never revealing much about himself, yet he was ambitiously driven to direct movies, fueled by his own self-professed mantra, “The best way to criticize a film is to make one.”  Transported to the streets of Paris in 1959, Godard, still not yet 30, is exasperated that he’s the last of the Cahiers critics who have not yet made a film, so he is eager to put his plethora of ideas into motion, but when he doesn’t have a screenplay or a devised shooting schedule, he gets plenty of push back from his producer Beauregard, who tries to steer him in the right direction, but the young filmmaker is having none of that, intentionally disregarding the standard formula for making films, having something fresher and more spontaneous in mind, where shooting on the streets of Paris is his built-in movie set, and he doesn’t want too much worked out ahead of time, preferring to be “in the moment.”  Beauregard agrees to finance a low-budget crime movie, but only if Godard works off a screenplay written by Truffaut and employs Chabrol to work behind the scenes, as they are already known quantities in the film world.

Lining up his stars, he turns to an amateur boxer, Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin), who worked with the director before, making the short film CHARLOTTE AND HER BOYFRIEND (1958), shot entirely in a hotel room, where Belmondo’s voice was dubbed by Godard after Belmondo was called into the army for his National Service, also American actress Jean Seberg (Zooey Deutch) in her short blonde hair, having made two films with Otto Preminger, SAINT JOAN (1957) and BONJOUR TRISTESSE (1958), known for his very demanding directing style, as he was a screamer and yeller, creating anxiety on the set with his endless takes.  Godard would be the antithesis of Preminger, as his only rule was there were no rules, which kept Seberg continually flustered, thinking this role might ruin her career.  Meticulously following the daily shooting routine over twenty days, the revolving characters behind the scenes inject the film with good-natured humor, as no one knew quite what to expect, but they never anticipated the audacity of a director who only shoots when he feels inspired, some days just for a few hours, and other days not at all, preferring to play pinball in a café, which infuriated his producer.  Working without a script, instead jotting down bits and pieces on a café napkin each morning before the shoot, there were no planned rehearsals, which Godard believed would take all the life out of the performances.  The Bogart-idolizing criminal Belmondo was a go-with-the-flow kind of physical actor, so he was good with it, as natural authenticity fit his persona, but Seberg as an American journalism student was all nerves and worry, wondering just what she got herself into, believing it would be a disaster, preferring to work with Rohmer or Truffaut, repeatedly threatening to quit, as this was a director who refused to take charge and instead let everything flow as it happened.  Linklater beautifully integrates the variety of characters behind the scenes while capturing that unbridled freedom on the set, where filming is like a jazz composition, with a central theme and multiple improvisational variations, including an impromptu dance sequence in a café by Belmondo and Seberg to (Baby) Hully Gully ~ The Olympics (1959) YouTube (2:03), a prelude to the Madison in Band of Outsiders (Bande à Part) (1964), Bande à Part - Madison Cafe Dance Scene - Jean-Luc ... - YouTube (3:50).  Written by a collaborating group consisting of Holly Gent and Vincent Palmo Jr., both having worked previously with Linklater, translated into French by Michèle Halberstadt Pétin and Laetitia Masson, and shot by David Chambille, having worked with Bruno Dumont on France (2021), none are exactly household names, but the real standout would have to be the original musical compositions written by jazz legend Sonny Rollins, where the chaotic, reckless energy feels perfectly integrated into the era.  While there are plenty of surprises, including a stream of directors and influences, one of them has to be Godard running into filmmaker Robert Bresson, the patron saint of French cinema who completely rejected established norms, greatly influencing the young New Wave directors, found shooting a scene in the Parisian subway tunnel from Pickpocket (1959), a film Jean-Luc Godard watched over and over again before filming BREATHLESS (1960), trying to capture the rhythmic design through such minimal film construction.  Godard’s quick working methods, in collaboration with former war photographer Raoul Coutard, who was used to shooting with minimal light, unsynced sound, and a lightweight, handheld movie camera, hilariously seen squeezing himself into a covered cart with his camera to secretly film along the Champs-Élysées, essentially captures the urgency of youth, with its creative chaos at the heart of one of the world’s most beloved and influential movies, where the personal manifesto driving its creation is art and freedom, yet this film goes beyond that, with Linklater portraying an entire generation of filmmakers, resurrecting the giddy spirit that infused this prolific period in cinema history.