Amir GanjavieRichard Linklater’s latest film, Nouvelle Vague, premiered in competition at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival amid great anticipation. A self-professed cinephile and one of the leading figures in American independent cinema, Linklater takes on a formidable subject: the making of Breathless (À bout de souffle, 1960), Jean-Luc Godard’s groundbreaking debut and a cornerstone of the French New Wave. For a filmmaker who has long drawn inspiration from European auteurs, especially the loose, time-driven storytelling of the Nouvelle Vague, this project is both a homage and a return to roots.
But despite its ambition and technical precision, Nouvelle Vague suffers from a fatal flaw: it is too enamored with its subject to offer any meaningful critique. The film unfolds more like a love letter than a layered portrait. We are invited into a beautifully rendered black-and-white recreation of late-1950s Paris, populated by fresh-faced actors who bear striking resemblances to their real-life counterparts. Guillaume Marbeck plays Godard, Zoey Deutch portrays Jean Seberg, and Aubry Dullin steps into the shoes of Jean-Paul Belmondo. But these performances are constrained by the film’s overarching tone of reverence. The characters are less people than emblems, flattened into archetypes in a film that hesitates to question the myth it seeks to honor.
Instead of exploring the tensions, contradictions, and politics that animated Godard’s early work, Linklater gives us a sanitized, heroic narrative. Godard is shown as an anxious yet visionary young director, a misunderstood genius gently clashing with producers and collaborators. But there’s no real confrontation with the complexities of his personality or the deeper currents of thought that made Breathless radical: the rejection of classical storytelling, the fragmented view of identity, the intersection of cinema and politics. What we get instead is pageantry—scene after scene of name-dropping, knowing nods, and vintage references that seem designed to flatter the initiated viewer rather than to challenge them.
Linklater has previously demonstrated a talent for blending structure with spontaneity (Boyhood, Before Sunrise), but here he chooses nostalgia over nuance. Nouvelle Vague is more recreation than reflection, more museum than cinema. Even when the film attempts self-awareness—introducing characters with name cards or showing the seams of the filmmaking process—it remains too timid to draw blood.
Godard famously claimed that the best way to critique a film was to make another one. In Nouvelle Vague, Linklater offers no critique at all. He memorializes rather than interrogates, paying tribute to a movement that once existed to tear down the very conventions this film seems desperate to uphold. In doing so, he reduces the restless energy of the Nouvelle Vague to a series of charming anecdotes and picturesque set pieces.
In short, Nouvelle Vague is not a film for thought—it is a film of admiration. For some, that may be enough. But for those seeking the spirit of rebellion that once defined Godard and his peers, this film may feel more like a eulogy than a celebration.
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