LUMI Reviews: Nouvelle Vague at BFF

Jean-Luc Godard would have hated this film about Jean-Luc Godard. But Godard hated a lot of things, including the fame that his first feature film, Breathless, achieved when it revolutionised cinema and propelled the Nouvelle Vague into the international mainstream in 1960. Richard Linklater (The Before Trilogy, Boyhood) has dramatised its chaotic production and the alienating confidence of Godard (played with aplomb by newcomer Guillaume Marbeck) in a fun, if familiar, exercise of cinephile hero-worship.

Nouvelle Vague begins with Godard sidelined and fretting. His fellow Cahiers du Cinéma critics have found success, François Truffaut has triumphed at Cannes with The 400 Blows, and Godard laments that he has reached the same ancient age as Orson Welles was when Citizen Kane was made (25). Making up for "lost" youth, Godard turns to a script from Truffaut about a cop-killer and his lover, who would go on to be played by the charismatic boxer Jean-Paul Belmondo and the American movie-star Jean Seberg. They are played by Aubry Dullin and Zoey Deutch in this film, eerily accurate casting that makes you wonder how Linklater found all these doppelgangers — most of the cast are making their feature-film debuts here.

I caught this at the Queen's Film Theatre on the last day of this year's Belfast Film Festival, an appropriate setting with a clearly receptive audience. But does a group of cinephiles nodding at references justify Linklater's project? Perhaps Nouvelle Vague, which is coming out on Netflix imminently, will introduce new audiences to Breathless. Maybe it will be useful for professors introducing the film to undergraduate students. But I can't help feeling it is superficial to retell a story so unquestionably enshrined in the cinematic canon.

After Breathless has wrapped production, the editors complain that "a quarter of the reels are close-ups of Jean Seberg". It emphasises that Linklater's film has mostly avoided close-ups, preserving the effect of Seberg's close-up for the end of this film. But the best moments of Nouvelle Vague are a different type of close-up that I wish was more prominent. Linklater adores the antiquated Éclair Cameflex camera that cinematographer Raoul Coutard used to film Breathless, capturing its whirring intricacies, light weight, and leathered finish in Nouvelle Vague's own 4:3 black and white film stock. He makes a point that the camera doesn't have sync-sound and uses this absence to imagine apocryphal jokes being made during the most iconic scenes of Breathless. These moments are Linklater at his least referential and most energetic; a perfect end to a film festival celebrating the magic of la caméra-stylo.

Nouvelle Vague will come to cinemas in the UK and Ireland in 2026 before being uploaded to Netflix where it will likely be forgotten in that huddled mass of content — like much better films have before it. But, if you've got 100 minutes to spare and an unhealthy love for Godard's one-liners, then Linklater's latest is worth searching for.