Whenever you make a movie about a movie, especially one as iconic and influential as Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, you’re always painting a bit of a target on your back, no matter how much you honour your inspiration. For Nouvelle Vague, his second film of 2025 after Blue Moon, Richard Linklater has a relatively novel solution for this problem, though – borrow some of the French New Wave stylings but fundamentally make it another one of his ‘hangout’ movies, louche and loose in the ways that made Linklater himself an icon. The result is a moderate success, not as funny or affecting or well-acted as his best stuff, but still a film that doesn’t embarrass itself by putting itself in conversation with Godard, which isn’t nothing.
Played here by newcomer Guillaume Marbeck, Nouvelle Vague follows Godard, inspired/made seethingly jealous by the directorial success of his Cahiers du Cinema peers like Francois Truffaut (Adrien Rouyard) and Claude Chabrol (Antoine Besson), and his freewheeling shoot for Breathless. Amusing his friends, baffling his leads Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin, an incredible likeness) and Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch), and deeply frustrating his producer, he cuts shoot days short and improvises constantly, tensions that would play for harsh drama in plenty of other films but here are mostly played off as low-stakes artistic whimsy.
It’s a low-key approach (mirrored by Linklater’s visual style, which is in black and white with faux-cue marks but stops short of replicating Godard’s revolutionary-but-jarring jump cuts) that is sometimes frustratingly airy but mostly charming. Linklater couldn’t make a bad hangout movie if he tried and even with the switch over to French (as scripted by writing duo Holly Gent and Vincent Palmo Jr), his approach here is witty and zippy, pulled off well by the young and mostly inexperienced cast. It’s hardly as funny as, say, Everybody Wants Some but it wrung plenty of smiles out of me even as I felt rather resistant to the slightly gimmicky overall premise.
Like Blue Moon earlier this year, Nouvelle Vague is a real namedrop-fest and maybe only really works if a majority of those names do actually mean something to you, especially as it lacks the grounding of a sublime lead performance like Ethan Hawke provided in the former. It’s the kind of thing that would be annoying if it wasn’t also just consistently enjoyable. Perhaps some might feel that such a monumental moment in cinema history should be treated with more weight in its reenactment, but in playing to his strengths, Linklater emerges from his self-imposed impossible task with plenty of dignity intact.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 