Nouvelle Vague review – Richard Linklater's witty, whimsical love letter to Jean-Luc Godard

Remember PADS? This was the ‘post-Avatar depression syndrome’ widely reported in 2010, where distressed filmgoers claimed that they were feeling blue because the planet of Pandora from 2009’s Avatar was not real. James Cameron’s CGI-assisted vision of an alien rainforest throbbing with bioluminescence was so compelling they wanted to literally go there (and be immediately ripped apart by a hungry viperwolf or whatever).

Now Before Sunrise and Boyhood filmmaker Richard Linklater has given us a glimpse of his own personal Pandora, the movie he clearly dreams of living inside. In Nouvelle Vague, the Texas-born director has painstakingly but also somehow nonchalantly recreated the seductive, second-hand smoke-filled Paris of Jean-Luc Godard’s À Bout de Souffle – aka Breathless, the formally daring, existential crime film that strapped a rocket to the nascent New Wave cinematic movement in 1960.

The homage extends to shooting Nouvelle Vague in scratchy black-and-white with French dialogue and the same boxy aspect ratio as the original.

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The 29-year-old Godard is played by Guillaume Marbeck, radiating brattiness and loftiness from behind his permanent shades. He is a tetchy film critic whose journalistic peers like François Truffaut (Adrien Rouyard) and Claude Chabrol (Antoine Besson) are already making inroads into the actual film business. Godard’s reviews call for more spontaneity and emotional realism in cinema.

So what will happen when this wannabe director finally wrangles a budget out of bearish producer Georges de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfürst)?

Like the recent meta-spoof Anaconda, this is a behind-the-scenes movie about amateur filmmakers. There is an outline, co-written with Truffaut, based on a sensational true crime story about a Frenchman on the run who kills a cop and is eventually turned in by his American girlfriend. Godard also has a ratty notebook filled with a decade’s worth of ideas honing his cinematic philosophy. But an actual script remains elusive.

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A crew is assembled, a tight 20-day shooting schedule agreed. Godard recruits screen unknown Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin) to be his lead and somehow gets American starlet Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch) to sign on too, perhaps because this shoestring production is going to be so far removed from her recent bruising experiences with demanding director Otto Preminger.

What follows is the typical DIY chaos of an indie film shoot, combined with Godard’s eccentric working methods of coming up with scenes and dialogue on the spot. If he remains uninspired, the day wraps early (great for the crew but coronary-inducing for money-man De Beauregard). The laid-back Belmondo is friendly with Godard and happy to go with the flow; the more established Seberg is at first bemused but then exasperated at her director’s off-handedness and apparently bottomless well of nominally profound quotes from other artists.

“Will it cut together?” frets the concerned script supervisor after yet another seemingly random scene is filmed in one take. The audience has the privileged information that Breathless exists (even if its aggressive editing was seen as heretical at the time) so we know it all works out. And there is the joy of seeing genuinely iconic scenes – like Seberg and Belmondo strolling up the Champs-Élysées hawking the New York Herald Tribune – from the reverse angle.

The result is a gorgeously realised, illuminating companion piece to one of the bedrocks of modern filmmaking. For voracious cineastes, there is also a constant parade of well-cast cameos: here’s a glimpse of Jean-Pierre Melville, or Robert Bresson, or Agnès Varda, or Jean Cocteau. 

Nouvelle Vague is constantly witty, whimsical and sometimes rather moving, and has plenty to say about the importance of being true to your artistic vision (even if you’re not entirely clear on the day-to-day logistics). 

Nay-sayers will say Linklater’s love letter couldn’t exist without Breathless. But you could say that about a lot of terrific films from the last 65 years. Another one in debt to Godard isn’t going to hurt. 

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