**Nouvelle Vague Review: Richard Linklater’s Love Letter to Godard and the French New Wave**
How do we feel about movies about movies these days? Not great, especially after *Mank* a few years ago, when Hollywood’s self-indulgence seemed to have reached a new high. But Richard Linklater’s *Nouvelle Vague* (now streaming on Netflix) might just warm us up to the idea again.
As the title implies, this film is Linklater’s genuflection toward the French New Wave, specifically focusing on the movement’s defining film, Jean-Luc Godard’s groundbreaking 1960 masterpiece *Breathless*.
Shot in grainy, no-nonsense black-and-white—much like Godard often did—*Nouvelle Vague* recreates the making of *Breathless*, rendering it as a breezy dramedy about an insufferable yet brilliant auteur who breaks all the rules of cinema and rewrites the rules of the form, frequently flustering everyone in his sphere.
Ironically, the film itself is pretty conventional considering its subject matter. But that’s part of why it remains light-on-its-feet enjoyable.
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### Nouvelle Vague: Stream It or Skip It?
**The Gist:**
It’s 1959. Jean-Luc Godard (played by Guillaume Marbeck) is a film critic for *Cahiers du Cinema*, France’s premier magazine and ground zero for the French New Wave movement. His coworkers include notable figures such as Jean Cocteau, Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, and Francois Truffaut.
At this point, these men are just critics, but all would eventually become leading filmmakers of the movement. Godard, who had only made a short film until now, yearns to do more. He travels to Cannes to see Truffaut’s *The 400 Blows*, but whether he feels jealousy, contempt, or admiration at the ovation *The 400 Blows* received is hard to determine—especially since Godard always wears sunglasses, even indoors and in the dark, when a movie is playing. You might feel an urge to slap those glasses off his head just to bridge the distance between us and his eyes—or maybe to immortalize them in bronze.
Glass or no glass, Godard has a vision. He pitches it to producer Georges du Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfurst): “All you need is a girl and a gun.” He has no script, and Beauregard most likely believes Godard has no idea what he’s doing. Nevertheless, he is swayed by Godard’s ambitious ideas about pursuing the lyrical instead of a traditional narrative. They agree to shoot the film in 20 days, with a single handheld camera, guerilla-style on the streets of Paris.
Their approach is minimalist: no lights, no makeup, no dollies, no cranes, no microphones—nothing beyond a tiny cast and crew. Godard insists on no more than two takes per scene, and again, no script. Dialogue will be overdubbed during post-production.
Godard casts Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin), who starred in Godard’s previous short, as his leading man—the guy with the gun. The girl is played by Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch), an American actress fresh off some difficult Otto Preminger shoots. Thus begins a running joke in which Seberg repeatedly asks Godard to see the script.
Seberg is accompanied by her husband, Francois Moreuil (Paolo Luka Noe), and a makeup artist who mostly hangs around without working—after all, there’s no makeup.
Godard’s script supervisor (a comedic touch) tries to maintain visual continuity, but might as well be shouting at the sky. “Reality is not continuity,” Godard insists.
At least his cinematographer, Raoul Coutard (Matthieu Penchinat), has plenty to do. He even crams himself into a cart with a hole cut in it for the camera so they can shoot undetected on Paris sidewalks.
Godard and the crew hang out in cafés until he decides to shoot—if he bothers to show up at all. Some workdays last only two hours. Everyone is baffled: Belmondo finds it amusing, Seberg grows frustrated, and Beauregard (or “Beau-Beau,” as Godard calls him) is beside himself.
Eventually, Godard and Beauregard tussle on the floor of a café—a scene emblematic of the conflict between visionary artists and the money guys who don’t understand them, at least not yet.
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### What Movies Will It Remind You Of?
If you liked *The Artist* director Michel Hazanavicius’s style—you might recall his Oscar win for that film—you may be interested to know he also helmed a different Godard bio, *Redoubtable* (aka *Godard Mon Amour*), about the making of *La Chinoise*.
In the same genre, there’s also *Mank* and the wildly entertaining *The Disaster Artist*. If you want to learn more about the gamine delight Jean Seberg, check out Kristen Stewart’s portrayal of her in *Seberg*.
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### Performance Worth Watching
The characters here are secondary to the iconography, but Zoey Deutch—veteran of Linklater’s *Everybody Wants Some!!*, where she was utterly marvelous—remains one of the most underrated actors working today.
Her presence in *Nouvelle Vague*, as in most of her films, is robust, funny, and airy at the same time—it’s a balanced and substantive performance.
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### Memorable Dialogue
Jean Cocteau congratulates Francois Truffaut on *The 400 Blows* with these words:
“Congratulations, Francois. Remember, art is not a pastime, but a priesthood.”
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### Sex and Skin
None.
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### Our Take
Richard Linklater is one of the truly great filmmakers to emerge from the ’90s. If he wants to make a love letter to influential cinema icons, he absolutely should. It’s no surprise that *Nouvelle Vague* is highly entertaining and stylish, shot with all the visual grit you’d expect.
Watch for the “cigarette burns” in the corners (those little dots projectionists use to switch reels) appearing in this Netflix streaming movie—something Godard probably would have lambasted as derivative pastiche.
Linklater’s core idea is simple: to show an artist willing to unapologetically pursue his vision, even literally going to the mat—the tile floor next to a pinball machine Godard was playing on instead of shooting his film—to see it through.
One imagines Linklater, a visionary himself, has been in a similar situation before (maybe *Dazed and Confused* will one day get its own Nouvelle Vague–style treatment).
He frames it more as a source of comedy and inevitability than dramatic tension, with a knowingly winking tone.
The film knows Godard is right and the skeptics and bean-counters are wrong, and that *Breathless* would become an influential beacon for decades of subsequent cinema.
The flatteringly unflattering characterization of Godard as a maddening capital-A Artist, whose interior life is either off-limits or nonexistent (dare I call the characterization vague?), is a nudge and a simplification, but also believable: it’s a snapshot of a man who knew what he wanted and executed it.
True to the ideological thread in Linklater’s filmography, *Nouvelle Vague* is structured as a slice of time, captured and encapsulated as it counts those 20 days of shooting.
He’s essentially arranging icons on a board in an amusing way, prompting our curiosity about who they were, what they did, and why they deserve to be highlighted.
As a traditional narrative, it’s flimsy. But as a nod to one of cinema’s greats, it’s far more fun than you might expect.
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### Our Call
Non–cinephiles might find little meaning in *Nouvelle Vague*; good as it is, it will likely be regarded as minor Linklater.
But speaking as one, this is a smart, sharply crafted, and intensely likable film. **STREAM IT.**
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*John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.*
https://decider.com/2025/11/14/nouvelle-vague-netflix-review/