It would not be difficult for one to come up with a fairly generous list of good-to-great movies about movie-making: Preston Sturges's Sullivan's Travels (1942), Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly's Singin' in the Rain (1952), François Truffaut's Day for Night (La nuit américaine, 1973), David Mamet's State and Main (2000). Of course, all of those movies are fictions about the making of fictional films, which means there is a much shorter list of movies (that aren't documentaries) about the making of specific, actual movies. The only ones that immediately jump to mind are James Franco's The Disaster Artist (2017) and David Fincher's Mank (2020), which would make for an interesting double feature given that the former is about the making of one of the worst movies of all time (Tommy Wissou's infamous The Room), while the latter is about the making (or at least the writing) of one of the greatest of all time (Orson Welles's Citizen Kane).

And now we have Richard Linklater's Nouvelle Vague, which is a dramatization of the making of Jean-Luc Godard's groundbreaking, rule-shattering French New Wave classic Breathless (� bout de souffle, 1960). Like any movie about the making of a famous movie, your interest in and response to Linklater's film will be directly proportional to your love of (or at least interest in) Godard's Breathless. From a wide angle, we can see Nouvelle Vague as a portrait of the determined, single-minded artist fighting against a rigid system to bring his vision to life—Godard as the rebellious artist-hero writ large. Such a view requires a certain amount of abstraction, and it is hard not to see that the film's real draw is its immaculate recreation of the time and place in which the stasis of postwar European cinema was fully ruptured by the brash young Cahiers du cinéma critics-turned-directors. I can imagine someone with only a passing knowledge of Breathless finding Nouvelle Vague engaging, but the only ones who will really love it are the ones who can distinguish Jean-Pierre Melville from Robert Bresson and recognize the meticulousness with which Linklater and his production team (with help from some expansive CGI) have nailed the costumes and locations, right down to the placement of specific cars along the curb, all shot in black and white in a 1.37:1 aspect ratio, of course.

Is that enough to make Nouvelle Vague a good movie? Maybe. I enjoyed it, but then again, I love the films of the French New Wave and have a deep and abiding fascination with film history, so I am nothing if not the film's target audience. Linklater, a breakout of the early 1990s American indie scene who has since gone on to direct a wide range of films that include romantic dramas, mainstream comedies, and experimental animation, beautifully recreates the bygone era, and he directs the film with a steady hand, resisting the temptation to make it a shaky, jump-cut-filled mimicry of Godard's style. He was also wise to cast actors not just because they bear striking resemblances to their real-life counterparts (all of whom have gone to that great cinema in the sky), but, more importantly, because they are able to fully embody them. I was pleasantly surprised that I was not distracted by the usual uncanny valley between actors and recent historical figures. As Godard, Guillaume Marbeck exudes a sense of confident cool, which, of course, is precisely what Breathless exudes; it is as if Godard turned himself into a film or at least made one that externalizes everything he is about. As the film's stars Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, Aubry Dullin and Zoey Deutch have the task of recreating some of the most memorable scenes in the history of European art cinema, and they acquit themselves well (Deutch nails the "New York Herald Tribune!" call), especially in the way they suggest their give-and-take faith in Godard's project (Seberg, as an already established screen star, had a lot more to lose).

But then, that is the fundamental problem with Nouvelle Vague: It lacks real dramatic urgency. Because we already know how it will all turn out—Breathless will become a monumental critical and commercial triumph and fully establish Godard as the preeminent genius director he always wanted to be—there is pressure on each scene to bear some kind of palpable tension, and they just don't. Even though he displays jealousy and insecurity early in the film because all of his contemporaries have already directed a feature, Marbeck's Godard is otherwise so confident in his project that he never seems in the slightest bit concerned that it might not work; this creates a sense of joy in experimentation, but there is never any danger. Screenwriters Holly Gent and Vincent Palmo Jr., who are regular collaborators with Linklater and originally came up with the idea for a movie about the production of Breathless back in 2005, try to create friction between Godard and his producer, Georges de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfürst), but there is never any sense that the plug might get pulled, even when Godard is lounging around a café smoking while he is supposed to be shooting. On-screen titles inform us of each day of production, but each just feels like another laconic drift into artistic mastery, the end result preordained by Godard's genius.

Copyright © 2026 James Kendrick

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