It’s hard to think of a French film more influential than Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless. Endlessly imitated and referred to, it has yet to be surpassed. It’s one of those films that is truly a landmark, heralding the arrival of one of the French New Wave’s most notable and enduring voices. Anyone who has seen the film can never forget it and even now, so many decades after it first saw screens, it still maintains its electric, iconoclastic power.
The making of said film is the subject of Nouvelle Vague, directed by Richard Linklater. While the film doesn’t attempt to demystify the filmmaking process, it offers a compelling look at the creative ferment of late 1950s Paris. Watching Linklater’s film provides a new appreciation for just how revolutionary Godard was and how his film wasn’t just a slap in the face to established modes of classical filmmaking but also a grasping toward something else, something new, something only cinema itself could hope to capture.
The film has an immersive quality that almost makes you feel as if you’re right there in the heady atmosphere of the period, when the air was thick with cigarette smoke and rich with artistic ferment. There’s a physicality to the film stock itself that heightens this sense of realism, and this effect is certainly helped by the uncanny resemblance between the cast and the characters they’re playing. Guillaume Marbeck is close to perfect as Godard, an irreverent sort of character who enjoys tweaking his cast and crew almost as much as he does his producer, who desperately wants this enfant terrible to just produce the kind of film that will be easy to distribute and that will hopefully make some money. Aubry Dullin is also a dead ringer for Jean-Paul Belmondo and, while he may lack some of the late Belmondo’s innate sex appeal, he nevertheless captures his twitchy energy perfectly.
It was Zoey Deutch, however, who truly stood out in terms of performance, and she is perfect as Jean Seberg, who plays Patricia Franchini in Breathless. Deutch has repeatedly shown herself to be one of her generation’s most versatile and interesting stars, and she puts her remarkable talents to extensive use here, giving us a Hollywood actress who truly doesn’t know what to make of this director with whom she now has to work. She locks horns with Godard almost immediately, in large part because she feels she’s been misled by what kind of a person she’ll be working with. As so often happens in the history of cinema, however, it’s precisely the volatile relationship between directors and stars that makes the most compelling and unexpected movie magic.
Linklater brings some nice stylistic touches to this sometimes very straightforward behind-the-scenes story. Periodically, new characters are introduced, and the action pauses for a few moments as they stand, framed by the camera in an almost documentary-like pose. Through these moments, we get to meet many of the luminaries of the French New Wave, from men like François Truffaut and Claude Chabrol to women like Agnès Varda. Once again, the casting here is truly on-point, and one could be forgiven for thinking they were truly bearing witness to a documentary chronicling the making of a masterpiece.
One of the most captivating moments happens once all the footage has been shot, and it’s time for editing. Godard, of course, dispenses with all of the rules of classical editing—and the advice of his editors—insisting on the jump cuts that, as any good cinephile knows, will become one of the most notable stylistic and formal flourishes in the film. This whole sequence is a reminder of the old magic of the movies, of how it’s really in the editing that a film coheres into a narrative, into a world in which viewers can lose themselves. It’s at this point that we realize just how absolutely brilliantly mad Godard was; he wanted to jettison all of the traits associated with classical realism and instead do something radical, something that can only happen when cinema is allowed to be its true self rather than something so rigidly controlled and corralled. It’s also a reminder of why, despite all of the technological changes and the influx of AI-generated content, no bot or artificial intelligence can ever capture the unique, mad spark of human creativity.
There’s a certain irony to the fact that this mostly very conventional film focuses on one of cinema’s iconoclasts. Even so, as other reviewers have remarked, the film is charming in its obvious love for Godard and what he set out to achieve. Nouvelle Vague celebrates cinema’s rich history. Given the extent to which many of today’s media producers are content to demolish cinema’s past, present, and future, films like this one are most welcome.
The appeal of a behind-the-scenes look at cinema is undeniable. The meta-ness of it all is always moving. What’s more, the film has a good story, and there are few stories in the history of cinema quite like the making of Breathless. The film’s strength lies in the fact that Linklater doesn’t try to explain away Godard’s genius. Godard remains something of an enigma right to the end, which is entirely appropriate and a final reminder that there really is no explanation, whether narrative or otherwise, for the strange genius of creativity.
Nouvelle Vague, currently streaming on , is a loving tribute to a pivotal moment in film history and a reminder of the enduring power of the cinematic vision.
