Cannes Film Festival 2025: Richard Linklater’s ‘Nouvelle Vague’ Lets You Hang Out With Cinema Legends

Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 classic Breathless is a film of grand importance and influence, which you might not know from watching Richard Linklater’s “making of” throwback Nouvelle Vague (or New Wave). Maybe that’s not such a bad thing. The Cannes 2025 competition title is slight in historical scope, but it makes for a delightful comedy-drama in the vein of Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!! and Dazed and Confused.

Whether or not Linklater reveres the French New Wave maestro seems irrelevant to the movie’s telling. He takes Godard’s ideas seriously without deifying the man, because Nouvelle Vague isn’t so much about singing the praises of Breathless as it is about observing the compelling moment of its creation. Save for a handful of effective close ups, there’s a distance between Linklater’s camera and the events as they unfold, which grants him permission to ape the outward texture of Breathless—black and white film stock, a 4:3 aspect ratio, and so on—if not its techniques.

For the uninitiated: Breathless broke new ground with its oblique aesthetic decisions, from lengthy walk-and-talks to jump cuts, though these have since become common visual parlance. Linklater’s own Before trilogy owes a huge debt to Godard, but rather than re-visiting this cinematic source code, the Texas native instead opts to craft a movie that feels entirely his own, with the rhythms of something with more classical (and more classically American) in its framing, editing and staging. Perhaps Godard would have balked at this depiction—Linklater’s fictional version of him (played by a resplendently fun Guillaume Marbeck) practically does—since the outsized influence of American cinema was a huge sticking point for the French legend, and a big reason Breathless exists at all. However, that Linklater’s homage doesn’t involve pale imitation is something of a relief. What could possibly live up?

Photo: Cannes Film Festival

The result is a hangout movie first and foremost, one that understands that while Godard went on to push the boundaries of cinema right up until his death, his directorial career began with a scrappy independent project that would’ve likely been fun and frustrating to those yet to be convinced of his genius. He was, after all, only 29 when he made his mark, a fact of which Nouvelle Vague never loses sight, with its litany of supporting characters playfully dressing him down.

The movie begins by introducing Godard alongside fellow New Wave enfant terribles Francois Truffaut (Adrien Rouyard), Suzanne Schiffman (Jodie Ruth-Forest) and Claude Chabrol (Antoine Besson), fellow critics for French magazine Cahier du Cinema, who all recently made their directing debuts. Godard is the last of their cohort to take the leap, leaving him to navigate both the labyrinth of film funding and pressures of expectation. However, Marbeck’s droll delivery helps craft a cool, calm and collected Godard, who spouts philosophical quotes from behind his shades, and almost always poses with a cigarette as he saunters across the frame. He’s a mystery of sorts, not unlike James Mangold’s Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown. Only where Mangold’s camera felt in awe of his central subject, Linklater’s seems more bemused by his youthful gamble.

This cautious perspective aligns with that of Breathless actress Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch), a rising American star whose skepticism and frustration with Godard’s erratic techniques is the heart of Nouvelle Vague’s comedy. On the other hand, her co-lead Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin) goes with flow, convincing her to let loose and give in to Godard’s script-less musings. For Seberg, this experience is one of constant negotiation, and despite having been proven wrong by history, Linklater’s camera never judges her for her misgivings. If anything, when Godard slinks away from set to scribble ideas in his notebook, he seems entirely off his rocker, which is part of the movie’s fun.

Photo: Cannes Film Festival

From a meta perspective, the question of whether Linklater himself buys into Godard’s madness is equally amusing to unpack. Like any stylistic influence this enormous and omnipresent, it’s hard for a film like Breathless not to seep into one’s creative DNA. In fact, this might even be possible without having ever experienced Godard’s work. Linklater introduces each legend from the era—Varda, Rohmer, Rossellini, Cocteau—with their own individual frame and slug text plucked out of time, like something from a Wes Anderson film (if anything Anderson’s post-modern wonderlands are the true American successor to Godard). However, when it comes to the specific innovations of Breathless, Linklater plays coy, and only employs familiar shots and cuts on special occasions.

When the story begins taking shape in Godard’s mind, we glimpse his signature jump cuts during a car ride (much like in Breathless), and when he finally begins shooting, we’re finally afforded the pleasure of a conversation in a lengthy, snaking wide shot, the kind with which he would go on to capture Seberg and Belmondo. Other than these two moments—in which Godard’s ideas are so potent that they re-shape the image—Nouvelle Vague is mostly constructed from traditional means, with back-and-forth coverage in medium shots that helps establish a wildly enjoyable comedic rhythm.

In fact, if there’s any shot that defines the film’s approach, it’s one of Godard operating a wheelchair as a makeshift camera dolly, moving across the screen in one direction as Linklater’s camera executes a similar shot while moving in the opposite direction, as though he were actively fighting against the tide of Godard’s influence. Regardless, they still briefly meet in the middle, because when you make a movie today, you’re speaking a language Godard practically re-wrote over six decades ago, whether or not you realize it.

Nouvelle Vague may not be enlightening the way Godard’s movies usually were, but that Linklater toys with this language in service of a film about the joys of DIY filmmaking is all the more delightful. He does so while tossing both skeptics and believers in the mix, giving them equal claim to Godard the flesh-and-blood artist, as well as Godard the filmmaking legend, two identities that once existed as pure potential. We might be watching the film from a future vantage, with foreknowledge of how things went, but Linklater beams it to us from the past—from a time where such things were unknowable, and thus, all the more exciting.

Siddhant Adlakha (@SiddhantAdlakha)is a New York-based film critic and video essay writer originally from Mumbai. He is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, and his work has appeared in the New York Times, Variety. the Guardian, and New York Magazine.