On February 22nd, Sean Baker won Best Director at the 2025 Film Independent Spirit Awards for his film Anora. Upon his win, he exclaimed that “Indie film is struggling more now right now, more than ever,” and that “the revenue stream is gone and the only way to see significant back end is to have a box office.” Despite going on to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, Anora is amongst four winners from 1990 to gross less than $50 million. Nonetheless, Baker and an abundance of independent filmmakers (including Ari Aster, Robert Eggers and Halina Reijn) are still considered ‘rockstars', accruing a myriad of followers who will like, share and subscribe to their entire careers. It is with this same reverence, admiration and respect that Jean-Luc Godard and his band of cinephilic goons are considered in Richard Linklater's Nouvelle Vague; only these rockstars' profits were “substantial.”
The film begins—aptly enough—in the cinema as the lights illuminate an auditorium brimming with The French New Wave's finest; Godard (Guillaume Marbeck), Francois Truffaut (Adrien Rouyard), Claude Chabrol (Antoine Besson), Jacques Rivette (Jonas Marmy) and Eric Rohmer (Côme Thieulin). Set amidst the cusp of the atom-bomb sized film movement of the same name, Nouvelle Vague, pitched as a day-by-day following of the shooting of Godard's first film Breathless, is less so concerned with the minutiae found in tracing history and more so ensorcelling an audience with Wikipedia grade facts, well-researched quotes and an authentic wardrobe. Whilst well-meaning, Linklater is anything but subtle, forgoing the scrappy unpredictability of the era and embracing a more straightforward approach (Think The Disaster Artist).
Such an approach, therefore, necessitates more from the actor, whose responsibility it is to communicate the dreamy romance and reliable chaos absent from their surroundings. Newcomer Marbeck's owl-like rhythm and casual arrogance punctuate every scene as if Godard himself were pulled from 1959. “All you need for a movie is a girl and a gun,” he barks at producer Georges de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfürst) in order to ascertain funding. Marbeck delivers every line that threatens to contort the director into a pull-string-action-figure of famous quotes into conscientious riddles assembling a legacy. An iPhone faced Jean Seaberg (Zoe Deutch), however, who acts as a foil to Godard's uncanny methods, is too cartoonishly whimsical amidst a cast determined to live their roles instead of play pretend.
Nouvelle Vague's architecture, which in tracing Linklater's respect for The French New Wave, adopts the same filmmaking methods—handheld cameras, unsynced sound, choppy editing and scratchy celluloid—that punctuated Breathless itself, filling in the gaps with VFX and a rigid screenplay. Stylistically, this sort of operation functions similarly to how a Dogme 95 biopic may, shooting on handheld 35mm, but the director is credited, props are brought in, and it's shot on a sound stage. In other words, all style, no substance.
“I'm always trying to create a movement,” Godard vows. Linklater, however, is trying desperately to re-create one, rather than settling into the ‘casual hangout' mode of storytelling he often excels at. A movement such as this is more than riddles, handheld cameras and engineered film decay. After Godard steals money from the Cahiers du Cinéma drawer in order to attend the Cannes premiere of The 400 Blows, the cinema screen is reflected in his jet-black goggles. Perhaps there is no better metaphor to describe Nouvelle Vague—a mirror image, struggling to capture its subject, desperate to capture something great.
Nouvelle Vague screened at the Cannes Film Festival.
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