You can’t fault Richard Linklater for work ethic. In 2025 he premiered two tributes to cultural heroes at senior European film festivals. Blue Moon, his amusing if slightly fusty study of Richard Rodgers, won prizes at the Berlinale 12 months ago.
Nouvelle Vague, a take on Jean-Luc Godard’s move into features, had l’effronterie to premiere at Cannes. There was some snorting about an American daring to dip his toe in sacred French waters. Yet Cahiers du Cinéma, the hard-to-please bible of Gallic film, ended up listing it among the 10 best of the outgoing year. He must have done something right.
Nouvelle Vague is, as the title suggests, more than a tribute to one man. It is a celebration of an era. That obviously takes in the innovative school of cinema that emerged in France at the turn of the 1960s. An early sequence frames three high priests of the new wave with delicious economy: the intense François Truffaut, the bookish, pipe-smoking Claude Chabrol and the absurdly self-aware Godard. “He’s the real genius,” somebody says. “Or at least that’s what he’d tell you.”
It is not quite true to say the new film’s style apes that of Godard’s still-engaging first feature. Like Breathless (À Bout de Souffle), Nouvelle Vague is shot in black and white within a narrow ratio. But it is shorter on jump cuts and jagged narrative. Linklater, dissenting from Godard’s famous claim that “a movie should have a beginning, a middle and an end, though not necessarily in that order”, wants us to follow the action in something like linear fashion.
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It is 1959, and the high priests are attending the premiere of Jacques Dupont and Pierre Schoendoerffer’s grandiose Afghan epic La Passe du Diable. Godard (Guillaume Marbeck, eerie), then a fiercely opinionated critic, declares that, unimpressed with the evening’s picture, he will now save le septième art with his own first full-length film. These are not his exact words, but we are in little doubt that is what he means.
Working from an outline by Truffaut, he settles on the offbeat crime drama that will become Breathless. The largely unknown Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin) is cast as the car thief who idolises Humphrey Bogart. The Hollywood star Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch) somehow or other – she can’t quite explain it – ends up playing his chic American girlfriend.
Godard’s methods prove unconventional (though not nearly so unconventional as they would later become). The threadbare script is constantly rewritten. The crew sit around as the film-maker waits for inspiration. The cast become increasingly bemused by the apparent anarchy.
If the screenplay by Holly Gent and Vincent Palmo is to be believed, Godard never came close to questioning his own haphazard vision. It is like watching Mark E Smith, the famously obstinate leader of the Manchester band The Fall, flinging oblique commands at his uncomprehending colleagues. The self-belief is everything. Without it, neither musician nor film-maker would have got past square one.
It is fitting that Nouvelle Vague turned out a Franco-American co-production. One is tempted to use the word “irreverent” about the titular film movement, but, in truth, the nouvelle vague was, for all the adherents’ Marxism, shamelessly in thrall to American popular culture.
Linklater repays the debt in a beautiful film that eschews granular analysis of the art for a broad celebration of Frenchness at its most proudly awkward. It captures the point at which artists were just discovering energies that would turn culture on its head in the decade to come.
Sure, this version of the French capital is no less idealised than that in An American in Paris. But even the snootiest cineaste is allowed a moment of escapism.
In cinemas from Friday, January 30th
[ I’ve just seen Hamnet. Why did nobody tell me it would be coma-inducingly boring?Opens in new window ]
