Nouvelle Vague is no masterpiece. But neither does it want to be.
Nouvelle Vague
a film directed by Richard Linklater and screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, September 4–14, 2025
Issue 152 of the French film review, Les Cahiers du cinéma, was a tribute to the seminal French filmmaker Jean Cocteau, who passed in October of the year prior, 1963. Within its pages, a singularly dense kernel of wisdom is disseminated by the legendary French director Jean-Luc Godard, originally written for a review of Cocteau’s Orphée (Orpheus [1950]): “Contraband poetry, then, yes, and so however much more precious, because it’s true as the German Novalis tells us, that if the world becomes dreamy, the dream itself becomes worldly.”
Whether Richard Linklater’s latest film, Nouvelle Vague (“New Wave” in English), itself a tribute to the late seminal French filmmaker Godard, succeeds in conveying Godard’s dreamworld, is questionable. The film is a behind-the-scenes styled adaptation of Godard’s monumental À bout de souffle (Breathless [1960]). We follow the director (played by Guillaume Marbeck) and his cast, Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin), Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch), and Godard’s cinematographer of choice, Raoul Coutard (Matthieu Penchinat), among others (including Godard’s friend and producer, Georges de Beauregard [Bruno Dreyfürst]), over the course of the film’s 20-day-long shoot. Techniques appear throughout the film as homage to Godard, whose own homage to T. S. Eliot’s famous quote that “immature poets imitate; mature poets steal,” rings in the back of our heads throughout.
However, the film often fails to extensively develop these revolutionary techniques beyond their occasional inclusion, often hurting the cinephile’s ego in his extensive knowledge of Godard’s contraband poetry: his abrupt cut-and-paste, fragmentary editing techniques; or his affinity for long, meandering shots. That the real cinephile can name offhand the filmography and cinematic contributions of every French (and one Italian) name momentarily mentioned in the film, such as Claude Chabrol, Jacques Demy, Suzon Faye, Jean-Pierre Melville, Marc Pierret, Alain Resnais, Pierre Rissient, Jacques Rivette, Éric Rohmer, Roberto Rossellini, Suzanne Schiffman, François Truffaut, and Agnès Varda, naturally entitles him to comprehend the cinematographic medium as that revolutionary thing Godard proclaimed it to be: an artform of constant movement, where only the cinephile knows how to run.
That the film intends, more than anything, to be a playful tableau of a beloved figure whose unconventionality produced indelible satires of film, is beside the point for the cinephile, who alone comprehends that cinema must always—unquestionably, without pause, without restraint, without hyperbole, without matriculation, without gesticulation, without momentary hallucination, and most of all, without recapitulation—be a revolutionary medium. Cinema is simultaneously « un cercle et une ligne droite », as Seberg so aptly comments to Godard outside a café terrace. But most of all, the make-up of this film, whose dialogue must be nearly 50 percent in Godardian aphorisms, can solely be claimed by the genuine cinephile. He understands that every aphorism is a single kernel of truth. Alone he stands against the tyranny of unseriousness and debased, low-class art that the masses, who pitifully know not what they do, continue to consume. There’s a reason Godard famously said, “All you need for a movie is a girl and a gun.”