Name: Nouvelle Vague
Director: Richard Linklater
Genre: Comedy, Drama, History
Released: 2025-10-08T00:00:00+00:00
Duration: 106 min
Cast: Guillaume Marbeck, Zoey Deutch, Aubry Dullin, Adrien Rouyard, Antoine Besson

A film about the birth of a film has to get the surface exactly right, and Richard Linklater builds his from the grain up. Nouvelle Vague reconstructs the shoot of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless in crisp monochrome, the same lustrous grays and hard Paris light that made the original look like a documentary smuggled out of a fashion shoot. The camera moves the way Godard’s once did, handheld and unhurried, watching a young critic argue his way into becoming a director.

The premise is almost a dare. An American filmmaker, working in French, rebuilds the most French of revolutions on the streets where it happened. Guillaume Marbeck plays Godard as a thin, watchful figure behind dark glasses, certain that shooting a film is the sharpest piece of criticism he could write. Texture is the argument here. The period cars, the cigarette smoke, the cropped collars and skinny ties read less as nostalgia than as evidence, a case that the movement was a look and a tempo before it hardened into theory.

Zoey Deutch anchors the film as Jean Seberg, and the casting is the clearest signal of what it wants to be. Seberg was the American inside the French experiment, a Hollywood face dropped into an unscripted city, and Deutch carries the same faint dislocation. Her short blond crop and Herald Tribune shirt do the iconographic work while her composure holds against the noise around her. Aubry Dullin plays Jean-Paul Belmondo with a boxer’s slouch. Adrien Rouyard is Francois Truffaut and Antoine Besson is Claude Chabrol, the Cahiers du cinema critics who decided the page was too small for what they wanted to do.

There is a second film folded inside the first, about the act of filming itself. Linklater stages the clapperboards, the blown takes, the producer counting francs, the cinematographer hauling a camera in a wheelchair down a boulevard. The recreation is granular enough to function as a making-of for a film that never had one, and the pleasure of it is watching improvisation get planned, frame by frame, into the look of accident.

The world it recreates ran on argument. Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol and their circle had spent years dismantling the lacquered French cinema of the day in the pages of Cahiers du cinema, and the wager dramatized here is the instant criticism walks off the page and picks up a camera. Linklater treats that turn as a design problem as much as a dramatic one. He builds the cramped editing rooms and the marble-topped cafe tables where a vocabulary was being rewritten, then lets the actors fill them with the restless, theory-drunk talk that powered the enterprise. The decor does the dating so the dialogue can stay alive.

Linklater shot on location with a largely unknown French cast and a designer’s discipline, matching lenses, light, and the loose choreography of bodies in a street to the rhythm of the source. The sound carries the same sparseness: footsteps, traffic, the clack of a slate, a jazz figure that arrives and withdraws. He has built whole films out of duration before, and the patience here reads as respect, the bearing of someone rebuilding a machine to understand how it ran.

What the film cannot manufacture is the danger. Breathless mattered because it broke the grammar of editing in public, with no permission and nothing to lose. A reconstruction, however precise, is an act of preservation, and Nouvelle Vague spends its length on the line where homage meets pastiche. It asks an audience to bring its affection for the New Wave through the door rather than earning that affection from scratch, and the very fidelity of the surface can smooth over the recklessness it means to honor. Beauty is the easy part. The risk is the thing that cannot be re-shot.

Still, a real idea sits inside the careful frame. The movement’s lasting bequest was less a style than a permission, the conviction that a camera, a street, and a point of view were enough to begin. Linklater, who built his own career at the edge of the studio system, films that conviction with evident feeling, and the monochrome turns from costume into a way of seeing. The black and white is not a filter laid over the past. It is the eye the film is asking you to borrow.

Zoey Deutch as Jean Seberg in the Linklater film Nouvelle Vague (2025) — Zoey Deutch in *Nouvelle Vague* (2025)

Nouvelle Vague runs 106 minutes and was produced by ARP Selection and Detour Filmproduction. The supporting cast includes Jodie Ruth-Forest as the editor Suzanne Schiffman and Bruno Dreyfurst as the producer Georges de Beauregard, whose nerve bankrolled a feature assembled from a treatment Godard sketched with Truffaut. The film premiered in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, where it drew an extended standing ovation, and Netflix acquired United States rights in a contested sale after the screening.

The film opened in France on October 8, 2025, and reached limited United States theaters on October 31 ahead of its Netflix release.