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It’s 1959, and 29-year-old Jean-Luc Godard (Guillaume Marbeck) isn’t happy. Sure, he’s a successful French film critic, but he doesn’t want to simply watch movies anymore — he wants to make them. That’s all you need to know when you start watching Nouvelle Vague, Richard Linklater’s zippy origin story of how now-legendary director Godard made his first film, the crime caper Breathless, and changed cinema forever.
Godard can’t make a movie by himself, so he enlists several people to help him. There’s Jean-Paul Belmondo, a young actor still looking for a role that will make him a star, and American actress Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch), whose career is in the dumps thanks to two recent Hollywood bombs. Along with assorted exasperated producers and daredevil cinematographers, Godard has what it takes to make a masterpiece — if only he can drag himself away from the cafe long enough to do so.
Shot in luminous black and white, Nouvelle Vague is a light comedy about the insanity of making films. That’s why Godard’s laissez-faire approach to filmmaking is so perplexing to his peers — they wonder if he’s taking it seriously. But the beauty of Linklater’s movie is that it shows just how much the film medium meant to Godard and vice versa. He needed to make Breathless so he could establish himself as a world-famous director. Cinema needed Breathless so it could evolve as an art form and inspire future artists for decades to come.
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