Movie Review: ‘Nouvelle Vague’ salutes the classic French filmmakers

Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague is the latest semi-current cinematic fanfiction, theatrical YouTube tribute-esque love letter to the process of filmmaking.

Don’t get me wrong, coming from me, this is a compliment. These qualities are exactly why I enjoyed Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) and parts of P.T. Anderson’s Licorice Pizza (2021) by Linklater’s fellow Gen X-ers. If I were to write a screenplay set during a classic period of cinema, I would use it as an excuse to reference all my favorite movies, music and stars as well.

This time, we leave Hollywood for Paris for 1959, with the making of the French New Wave’s most popular and influential export, Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960). Rather than fill his historical piece with the most recognizable actors in current French cinema, Linklater opts for local unknowns, save for Zoey Deutch as American starlet Jean Seberg.

This seems intentionally fitting, since Seberg was the only famous name attached to Breathless upon its initial release. too. In fact, I think Nouvelle Vague is a great example of how a non-famous cast might be the best route to go with biopics, so you don’t get distracted by a star’s ticks and characteristics.

Guillaume Marbeck fully captures the cynicism and arrogance of Godard, a man who knows he has talent and doesn’t bother to be humble about it. Aubry Dullin is perfectly silly and charming as FNW star and Breathless lead, Jean-Paul Belmondo.

Deutch might be the most impressive as she not only had to chop off and bleach her hair, but also perform more than half of her dialogue in French. And, after slumming it in B-movies and flops from 2013 to 2019, her performance finally confirms she is a star in her own right. 

Like a lot of film fans when Nouvelle Vague (French for “New Wave”) was first announced, I thought Linklater was a strange choice for its director. Not only because of his lack of connection to France or the country’s film industry, but because his movies aren’t very similar to those of Godard or other FNW legends.

But then, the more I thought about it, the more I started seeing the parallels. The artsy-fartsy, hipster/pretentious cliches American indie movies are usually associated with come from the same cliches in the French New Wave. And Linklater was the director of Me and Orson Welles (2008), which is centered on one of the old Hollywood film directors the FNW movement admired.

With Nouvelle Vague, Linklater puts himself in the shoes of JLG and shoots this new feature as if it were a French film from the era. There are plenty of tongue-in-cheek references to the character’s real-life careers and JLG’s respected peers, like François Truffaut, Agnés Varda and Robert Bresson, that would normally make viewers roll their eyes. But if you watch this as a longform “fan video” to the entire French film movement, then it’s a little less egregious.

I’ve personally never been super fascinated by the FNW era, and I find Breathless in particular a chore to get through. Yet I’m still a sucker for “movies about movies” and a casual fan of Deutch, so Nouvelle Vague ended up working for me.