With Nouvelle Vague, Richard Linklater delivers a cinephilic love letter to the birth of the French New Wave.
Richard Linklater was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award at this year’s Rome Film Festival for his extraordinary dedication to cinema — and the honour could not have been more deserved after the masterpiece that is his new movie, Nouvelle Vague (New Wave). Presented at the Festival following its Cannes premiere earlier this year, the film stars Guillaume Marbeck as Jean-Luc Godard, Zoey Deutch as Jean Seberg, and Aubry Dullin as Jean-Paul Belmondo. Linklater retraces the steps of the infamous Nouvelle Vague filmmakers through the summer of 1959 as they make À bout de souffle (Breathless).
Shot in a gorgeous grain of black and white, Nouvelle Vague is Linklater at his most cinephilic and self-aware — a film about the birth of one of the most important movies in cinematic history made by one of the most renowned filmmakers of his generation.
Across a career that spans from Slacker to Boyhood to the Before trilogy, Linklater has continually explored time, memory, and the tangential everyday rhythms of conversation. This often comes through dialogue heavy scripts with meandering, extended philosophical, drifting conversations. Nouvelle Vague, however, is not this. The dialogue is as sharp and witty as it is charming and light. Visually, the film is stunning. Linklater and cinematographer Shane F. Kelly capture 1959 Paris in all its grace and beauty without succumbing to cliche.
Aubry Dullin is astonishing as Jean-Paul Belmondo, inhabiting him with such easy charisma and physicality that it’s genuinely disorienting to remember he isn’t the real Belmondo. His chemistry with Zoey Deutch’s Jean Seberg is utterly charming. Guillaume Marbeck’s Godard, meanwhile, is played with quiet brilliance — not as a caricature of the intellectual filmmaker, but as a young artist on the verge of self-invention; at once arrogant and uncertain.
If Blue Moon, Linklater’s earlier 2025 feature which premiered at this year’s Berlinale, felt indulgent and over-written, Nouvelle Vague is its perfect counterpoint. To have revisited one of cinema’s greatest revolutions and make it feel new again is no small feat – particularly as an American director. Linklater commented at the film’s press conference that he believes this outsider status helped give him a certain distance – although he didn’t initially want it to be screened in France at all… Ironic, considering its subsequent Cannes premiere!
In his festival Masterclass, Linklater stated that right now is both the best and worst time to be a young filmmaker — but it’s difficult to imagine that Nouvelle Vague will not inspire thousands of people to go away and try and make their own version of Breathless. It’s a masterpiece that reminds us, as Linklater himself said, that “there’s always a revolution in cinema somewhere in the world.”
Nouvelle Vague will hit select theaters October 31 and will be available on Netflix on November 14 in the United States.
