Nouvelle Vague *** (2025, Guillaume Marbeck, Zoey Deutch, Aubry Dullin) – Classic Movie Review 13,785

Richard Linklater’s enjoyable 2025 US/ French comedy drama film Nouvelle Vague tells the story of the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s celebrated 1960 movie À bout de souffle [Breathless].

After writing film reviews for the French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, the young Jean-Luc Godard decides he needs to make his own first feature, having made one short (Jean-Paul Belmondo), though he says he despises short films. After all, all his critic mates have done so already. He’s seething with jealousy over his the successes of his colleagues, Truffaut, Rivette and Chabrol, especially after Truffaut’s sensation at Cannes with his debut feature Les Quatres Cents Coups.

Godard convinces producer Georges de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfürst) to fund a low-budget feature, and creates an outline of a story about a gangster couple with his critic/ filmmaker friend François Truffaut. Basically, there’s a bunch of ideas and a couple of characters but no script. Somehow they manage to persuade Hollywood star Jean Seberg to come aboard, and then stay aboard, partly it seems because she likes the man chosen as her co-star, surprisingly genial and good-natured ex-soldier/ boxer and budding actor Jean-Paul Belmondo. The result is the 1960 classic Breathless, a key film of French cinema’s Nouvelle Vague, the French New Wave.

Godard’s filming is all very amateurish and shambolic. Not at all admirable. There’s a strong impression that the film was a mess that got rescued in the editing. Godard coasts through on his appalling arrogance and unprofessionalism, treating everyone around him badly, while spouting idiotic aphorisms and quotes from films and literature. He is quite the anti-hero. Though there is a strong feeling that Nouvelle Vague (2025)’s director Richard Linklater sees him as a hero.

Nouvelle Vague is stylish and appealing, amusing and entertaining, lovingly made, boldly in black and white and French, very entertaining, though of course ultimately pointless. Why not just watch Breathless, the film this movie is about the making of. Come to that, why not just watch Truffaut’s Day for Night, the last word on film-making, well French film-making any way.

There are no real particular insights or surprises to anyone who knows their film history. It’s a well-known story, though director Richard Linklater does tell it quite smartly and succinctly. It doesn’t feel too much like a history lesson, or a run-through an encyclopaedia. The characters, all of them infuriating, really do come to life. It is thoroughly enjoyable as a seamless nostalgic tribute film.

Godard is shown as the tiresome, pretentious character we always though he was, so no revelation there. Seberg is portrayed in an ambiguous, thought light, so that’s quite subtle, one moment wanting to quit, the next moment ready to shoot. Belmondo is seen as an amiable lunk, an agreeable, good-looking boxer, which seems a bit simplistic, but maybe he was just that here in the early days. The joy (and heartache) of film-making is everywhere, and that is the film’s main appeal.

Zoey Deutch is rather good as Seberg, Guillaume Marbeck is quite good as Godard, and Aubry Dullin less good as Belmondo. They capture their spirits at least. The rest of the cast get little chance of much of a look-in, chosen more for their lookalike appearances than anything else.

Coming up with something new and fresh is so very difficult, as Godard might have agreed, and Linklater does not really achieve that, only a sweet homage to a past he obviously admires, and a director he so clearly adores. The film then is sweet nostalgia, and that Godard really would not have liked. Actually, he’d doubtless have hated this film, though that doesn’t mean we have to. He was pretentious and infuriating, remember? We can just enjoy being humbly entertained if we wish.

The production is painstaking, meticulous and elegant, as well as lavish and costly looking, ironically exactly the opposite of Godard’s slapdash, guerrilla film-making (if the continuity wasn’t working, don’t change it, build it in as a feature, everyone will love it).

There is nothing in the film about Godard’s falling out with Truffaut. They are shown as the best of pals, Breathless being made with Truffaut’s approval and blessing, and being considered for a cameo in the film, though in the event the role went to Godard himself. There is a lot of name checking (with captions) of other directors and key personnel in the drama, clumsy but no doubt necessary. But the roles of the other directors (Chabrol, Rivette, Rohmer, Melville, Rossellini, Demy, Varda etc) and others remain just that, no more than name checked. Except perhaps for Matthieu Penchinat as Godard’s heroically long-suffering cinematographer Raoul Coutard, who gets a bit of an entertaining look-in.

Key question: do you have to have seen Breathless for this film to make any sense. Well, you’d certainly have had to have seen to have much interest in Nouvelle Vague. Or maybe, just maybe, the iconic name of Jean Seberg will bring viewers in. Heaven knows what the French will make of it in a land where these names are gods.

At the end, we are told Godard carried on making the short films he says he despises. Godard may have been a great artist, he certainly made a handful of great films (and Breathless is undoubtedly one), but he was so contradictory and contrary, and so annoying. Talking annoying, the characters of Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo are pretty irritating as portrayed here too. Maybe they are supposed to be charming. Godard’s long-suffering producer Georges de Beauregard, who is supposed to be the villain of the piece, is constantly abused by Godard and weirdly emerges as the film’s hero. More irony!

Filming took place in Paris in March and April 2024.

It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on 17 May 2025. 

Released: 8 October 2025 (France) and 31 October 2025 (US).

Written by Holly Gent, Vincent Palmo Jr., Michèle Halberstadt, and Laetitia Masson.

Produced by Michèle Pétin and Laurent Pétin.

Starring Guillaume Marbeck as Jean-Luc Godard, Zoey Deutch as Jean Seberg, and Aubry Dullin as Jean-Paul Belmondo. Also in the cast are Jean-Jacques Le Vessier, Paolo Luka Noé, Laurent Mothe, Jade Phan-Gia, Benjamin Cléry.

Duration: 106 minutes.

Production: ARP Sélection, Detour Filmproduction.

© Derek Winnert 2025 – Classic Movie Review 13,785

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