Nouvelle Vague

A making-of that never existed but should have: with “Nouvelle Vague”, Richard Linklater attempts nothing less than a reimagining of French film history — and makes of it, quite shamelessly, a film about himself. Setting out from the question of what the shoot of Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless” might have looked like, Linklater unfolds a playful homage to the members of the Nouvelle Vague, to their freedom and their appetite for improvisation.

Guillaume Marbeck as the young Godard, Zoey Deutch as Jean Seberg, Aubry Dullin as Belmondo: the casting is as irreverent as it is exact, and Linklater shapes it not into a reverent biopic but into a living experiment in time.

The film glides between reconstruction and fantasy, between fragments of dialogue and observations on set. With a documentary feel for the everyday, but also with an unforced lightness, Linklater brings the rebellious youth of the Nouvelle Vague back into the present. More than that: his film becomes a manifesto against the economic ossification of cinema — a plea for filmmaking as a way of life that refuses to be bound by money, trends or industry requirements.

In the end it is less a look at Godard than at Linklater himself — at his appetite for beginning cinema over and over again. A seductively nostalgic love letter to the inexhaustible possibility of film. Long live cinema!

Shown at the 2025 edition of Around the World in 14 Films, Berlin.

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