“The offscreen is more evocative”, says a Jean-Luc Godard lookalike in “Nouvelle Vague,” Richard Linklater’s Palme d’Or contender at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. It is an astonishing inclusion in a film that is, ultimately, nothing more than a painstakingly detailed recreation of the making of Godard’s debut feature “Breathless” (1960) — a painfully literal demystification of the offscreen of the influential filmmaking movement that gives Linklater’s film its title.
To the American director and his screenwriters, Holly Gent and Vince Palmo, that line is only one of the many aphorisms the Swiss-born filmmaker was known for. In truth, Godard cultivated a cryptic persona, and his habit of quoting from novelists, thinkers, and filmmakers could create contradictions — it’s a quality that contributed to the charming, sometimes self-consciously zany side of him, which Linklater’s film captures well. But this peculiar practice was much more for Godard than a mere technique to confuse or impress others. His manner of communicating and expressing himself was part of a lifelong questioning of the possibilities of language and images. Likewise, his daring decisions as a filmmaker on “Breathless” were more than mere rule-breaking by an endearingly rebellious young director. They were interventions in the image-making world at large — just as his criticism at Cahiers du Cinéma had been, and like his filmmaking would continue to be in a career spanning over 60 years.
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What does Linklater’s own intervention in our current image-saturated moment signify? Concerned all his life with how history was recorded and remembered, Godard would have been the first to snicker at Linklater’s supposedly accurate recreation of a bygone era. But one need not be Godard to shiver at this rewriting of history. An AI-like deepfake, “Nouvelle Vague” dares attempt to erase our own imaginations by fixing on celluloid (did Linklater even ask himself what shooting on film means in 2025?) an incredibly dull, impossibly Americanized version of the truth. Linklater is hardly alone in wondering what it must have been like to be present when cinema history was being made — but this wondering was always part of the film’s rousing power. Shot in the streets and cafés of Paris and constantly drawing attention to their own making, Godard’s early features do not simply show the 1960s: they show him and his collaborators working in the 1960s. Wondering how “Breathless” was made was always part of its appeal; by presuming to show us, Linklater’s “loving tribute” threatens to take that productive, electrifying wonder away.
Thankfully, Linklater’s vision of the New Wave scene is too simplistic and unconvincing to truly make a dent in this precious imaginary. It is also too niche and too broad to possibly make any impact. Admirers of “Breathless” will either already know how it was made, or (correct position) won’t particularly care. Those unfamiliar with the film will be utterly uninterested and unable to grasp the importance of DOP Raoul Coutard using a smaller camera than usual, or Godard experimenting with jump cuts in the edit. 
All will be plain bored. Although Godard might have spoken only in citations, the other directors he meets ahead of filming “Breathless” certainly did not — and yet in “Nouvelle Vague”, they all maddeningly do. Besides shamelessly expository conversations, the film’s dialogue is almost entirely composed of these quotes, forming a meaningless series of non-sequiturs. It’s an artificiality that jars with the film’s concern with realism elsewhere. From recreating the black-and-white look of those early Nouvelle Vague films (many shot by Coutard), to casting actors who for the most part look and sound like their originals (Guillaume Marbeck’s gravelly voice as Godard is especially impressive), Linklater goes to extreme lengths to achieve a technically impressive form — once again entirely missing the point of Godard’s cinema, his search for spontaneity and genuine surprise.
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Apparently uninterested in bringing Godard’s awareness of cinema’s interaction with reality into this picture, Linklater instead designs “Nouvelle Vague” as an immersive experience — something to get lost in. It is a hangout movie, and Linklater presents the shoot of “Breathless” as a relaxed experience with only mild conflict between the director and the producer. This is all well and good, but in the context of Godard’s political engagement, and the fact that the French New Wave distinguished themselves by taking cinema seriously as an art form, this pleasingly mellow portrait of a bunch of kids making movies is also an instance of defanged nostalgia — when it was an occasion to highlight the economic, political, cultural circumstances that made this kind of creativity possible. Godard wasn’t just a restless genius; he was a clear-eyed pragmatist who saw that, in the times he was living in, films could be made cheaply and in the streets, shooting two hours at a time and stopping whenever he was out of ideas. Why isn’t this possible, neither in France nor in America, today? “Nouvelle Vague” does not even think to wonder. [D]
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