Nouvelle Vague (2025)

	Directed by: Richard Linklater	COUNTRY France/USA GENRE Comedy/Drama/ Historical NORWEGIAN TITLE Nouvelle Vague RUNNING TIME 106 minutes
	Produced by: Michèle Pétin Laurent Pétin
	Written by: Holly Gent Vincent Palmo Michèle Halberstadt Laetitia Masson

Cast includes:
CHARACTER	ACTOR/ACTRESS	RATING
Jean-Luc Godard	Guillaume Marbeck	½
Jean Seberg	Zoey Deutch	½
Jean-Paul Belmondo	Aubry Dullin
Georges de Beauregard	Bruno Dreyfürst	½
Pierre Rissient	Benjamin Clery
Raoul Coutard	Matthieu Penchinat
Suzon Faye	Pauline Belle	-
Marc Pierret	Blaise Pettebone	-
Claude Beausoleil	Benoît Bouthors	-
François Moreuil	Paolo Luka Noé	-
François Truffaut	Adrien Rouyard	½
Suzanne Schiffman	Jodie Ruth-Forest	-
Claude Chabrol	Antoine Besson	-

Review

This is a delightful little film from Richard Linklater, made with reverence for and in the spirit of the time and milieu it depicts: the emergence of the French New Wave of cinema in the late 1950s. As we enter the proceedings, Claude Chabrol has recently made a name for himself and François Truffaut has just had his breakthrough with Les quatre cents coups (1959), whereas our protagonist, the brash, irreverent and always bespectacled Jean-Luc Godard, is frustrated by not yet having made his first feature. When his chance finally arrives, adapting a script written by his friend Truffaut, titled À bout de souffle, Godard is determined to make the film on his own terms, without any concessions.

Shooting the film in nostalgic black and white in the classic Academy ratio, as À bout de souffle itself was, makes Nouvelle Vague a delightful time capsule and, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, never comes off as gimmicky. That is a testament to a director in full command of his craft. This is a motion picture made by an auteur about another auteur. What Linklater recreates here is not only the story of a seminal moment in film history, but also the spirit that drove it and made it possible – the philosophical and intellectual basis for it all. There were several proponents of the New Wave movement, which Nouvelle Vague certainly acknowledges through its rather elegant title-card-style introductions of key figures, but Godard was the most characteristic of them all, the film suggests. And anyone who appreciates the avant-garde qualities of À bout de souffle will hardly disagree. Nouvelle Vague is topped off with a handful of superb, charismatic performances by actors who bear an almost frightening resemblance to the real-life people they portray, not least Guillaume Marbeck as Godard and Zoey Deutch as his muse, Jean Seberg.