NOUVELLE VAGUE - Mark Reviews Movies

Nouvelle Vague, Netflix

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 30, 2025

The French New Wave didn't start with Jean-Luc Godard. It surely attracted more people with the filmmaker's debut feature Breathless, a mostly meandering crime drama that, even 65 years later, still feels like the embodiment of coolness—both in terms of style and emotional detachment. Director Richard Linklater is clearly enough of a fan to head to France, hire a bunch of local actors (and one American, just as Godard did back in the day), and not be too concerned if anyone except fellow fans will care about or understand this behind-the-scenes tale.

Nouvelle Vague follows the shooting of Godard's debut and doesn't seem interested in much about the process or the movie itself beyond the novelty of the filmmaker's approach. It is a funny movie, to be sure, because the narrative's Godard, played by Guillaume Marbeck, comes across as disinterested in the project he has been begging—as much as the man can beg—to make. Jean-Luc has seen his friends and colleagues at the famed film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma make and be applauded for their own filmmaking efforts. As a critic who has stated that the best way to criticize one movie is to make another, Jean-Luc is desperate to have his turn.

There's not much more insight into the man or the film at the center of this one. Breathless does, after all, kind of speak for itself, since its characters like to talk and the filmmaker fills his frames with every inspiration he wants us to know he had in making it. To try to dissect it is almost to miss the point, particularly because Godard himself, as briefly shown in the editing room near the end of this dramatization, removed everything unessential from the footage he shot. Godard dissected his own film before anyone else could, basically.

Why is it more interesting to discuss the real Godard, his approach, and the resulting film than the movie on hand? Well, the actual subjects of this movie, obviously, have the advantage of time and cultural longevity. It's mostly because Linklater, along with screenwriters Holly Gent and Vincent Palmo (adapted, presumably into French, by Laetitia Masson and Michèle Pétin), are trying to capture a moment and a concept that have already been immortalized in the film he's examining from the other side of the camera.

We don't really need to be told and shown that the making of Breathless was spontaneous and surely annoyed anyone with a set belief of how movies are supposed to be made, let alone producer Georges de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfürst). The '60 film gives that sense in every scrappy scene, every piece of dubbed dialogue, and every jarring jump cut.

What we're left with, then, is an amusing little lark, filled with big personalities clashing, trying to work together as much they can, and occasionally realizing that they're making something at least different, if not special. Marbeck is quite charming as Jean-Luc, convincing us that his knowledge of and perspective of cinema would appeal to relative outsiders like himself and insiders who see this new wave of filmmaking as a way to make some money. The actor also gets at the ego of this man, who comes across as entitled to be allowed to make a movie exactly as he wants to with as little input from anyone else as possible. This movie simply accepts both of those qualities as the reason Breathless was made and succeeded, and since those two ideas are the only ones that matter to this movie, they're what we see over and over again.

He has allies, mainly his star Jean-Paul Belmono (Aubry Dullin) and fellow critics at the magazine who have or will become filmmakers in their own right (Only a few of them get more than two or three lines of dialogue, but on-screen titles make sure we know who each and every featured or background player is), and he has plenty of foes. Georges is a big one, as he keeps showing up to the shoot to discover the director writing the script for the day at a café, finishing a day of production after only a couple of shots, or not showing up at all.

In the middle is Jean-Luc's other star, the American actress Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch), who agrees because her husband François Moreuil (Paolo Luka Noé) thinks it would be good for her career and because it gives her a little wiggle room in an undesirable Hollywood contract. Deutch is utterly beguiling in this role, which is mostly what the movie requires the character to be. However, there's also a glimmer of wisdom in the way the actress' Jean can see right through the fact that Jean-Luc doesn't have much concern about the character she's playing—except to be a particular archetype and to serve as the director's stand-in for an interview scene with filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville (Tom Novembre).

The production scenes possess the kind of on-the-fly energy this hasty and ramshackle shoot must have had (An especially amusing moment has tall cinematographer Raoul Coutard, played by Matthieu Penchinat, realizing he's going to be hidden in small cart and, as a former war photographer, not even flinching). They're fun and funny, to be sure, but Nouvelle Vague doesn't take its behind-the-scenes story any further or dig into it any deeper than relating that attitude.

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