Nouvelle Vague (2025) and the French New Wave

By Larry Lee

If you are reading this, you probably love the movies.  And if you love the movies, I’ll bet you love watching movies about the movies.  What true film lover can resist, say, director Stanley Donen’s Singin’ in the Rain, about the advent of sound in movie business, circa 1929-30.  Or Robert Altman’s The Player, a comedic satire about Hollywood.  Or Chaplin, with Robert Downey, Jr.?  Or The Stunt Man, with Peter O'Toole?  Or last year’s The Fall Guy, with Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt?  Or The Bad and the Beautiful, with Kirk Douglas as a detestable movie producer?  Or Tropic Thunder?  Sullivan’s Travels?  Ed Wood?  The Coen brothers’ Barton Fink?  The list is endless.  (I guess you could add AppleTV’s The Studio, which recently won a whopping 13 Emmys, to the list.)

Here’s another one:  Nouvelle Vague.  Directed by Richard Linklater (Hit Man, Boyhood, the Before Sunrise trilogy, School of Rock - and the just released Blue Moon), this new movie—about the creation and filming of Jean-Luc Godard’s ground-breaking French New Wave movie Breathless (À bout de souffle)—is a filmic confection for film lovers, taking us back to an exciting moment in film history when, by some accounts, everything changed.  No longer was it deemed necessary for a movie to hew to a linear story arc.  Characters could be maddeningly inconsistent or absurd, and the reality and fantasy could sometimes blur.  Dialogue could be improvised.  Editing could be jagged and cuts could even be apparent.  Modern jazz was common.  Shooting on location, with a small budget, with long tracking shots and often with non-professional actors, was no problem.  Exploring existential themes was common.

If you are at all familiar with the French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague in French), then you have likely seen Godard’s Breathless, Francois Truffaut’s Jules et Jim or The 400 Blows, Éric Rohmer’s My Night at Maud’s or Claire’s Knee, Jacques Rivette’s Celine and Julie Go Boating, or Agnes Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7.  I remember that these movies would play quite often at the Nuart Theater in West Los Angeles when I was a college student at UCLA in the 1970s.  I saw most of them at that repertory movie house; this was, after all, before one could rent a VHS tape at your local Blockbuster video store, before you could get DVDs by mail from Netflix, and certainly before streaming.  I admit that, at that time, I did not understand these movies at all.  With age may come wisdom, however, and perhaps it is time to revisit them.     

Viewing Nouvelle Vague may well push you to seek out these titles as well (see below).  The movie informatively shows us the milieu in Paris at the time, and what these young film-critics-turned-directors were thinking.  It then recreates Godard’s filming of his seminal movie, Breathless.  The acting is terrific, with Frenchman Aubry Dullin as the young Jean-Paul Belmondo and American Zoey Deutch as Jean Seberg, as well as Guillaume Marbeck as director Godard.  The movie not only teaches about the New Wave but itself mimics many aspects of New Wave filmmaking:  filmed in black-and-white, the movie contains jump cuts, quick editing, naturalistic acting and location shooting.  I would not be surprised if Linklater eschewed using a tracking dolly or a steady-cam and just pushed his camera operator in a shopping cart, as Godard did.  But along the way, Linklater amuses us with sly humor while making sure we recognize these young titans of the French New Wave:  directors Claude Chabrol, Francois Truffaut, Jacques Rivet, Agnes Varda, Èric Rohmer.  So one could say the movie embodies both the principles and the principals of the French New Wave.  This was clearly a labor of love for the director.  That Linklater, who is from Texas, made a movie largely in French, is all the more amazing.

Consider that these were the movies nominated for the Best Picture Oscar just before the start of the French New Wave:  Anatomy of a Murder, The Diary of Anne Frank, The Nun’s Story, Room at the Top, and the eventual winner, Ben-Hur.  There is nothing wrong with any of those movies, but the French New Wave showed us there could be a different way to tell a story, to show a story, and that there were different kinds of stories to tell.  Think of the justifiably famous long, continuous tracking shot at the beginning of Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas.  The non-linear story arc in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction.  The blending of real and magical in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie.  The existential angst in Mike Nichols' The Graduate.  The use of non-professional actors in Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland.  Or the anarchic feel of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde or Richard Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night.  To that, we say:  Merci beaucoup, Nouvelle Vague.    

1 hour 46 minutes         Rated: R (for some language)

Grade:  A-

Nouvelle Vague will be released in select theaters in the U.S. on 10/31/202; followed by a streaming release on Netflix beginning 11/14/2025.

*  *  *

Streaming availability of other films mentioned above:

• Breathless (1960, dir. Jean-Luc Godard):  stream on HBO Max, Criterion, Kanopy, rent on Prime.

• Jules and Jim (1962, dir. by Francois Truffaut) stream on HBO Max, Criterion, Kanopy, rent on Prime.

• The 400 Blows (1959, dir. by Francois Truffaut) stream on HBO Max, Criterion, Kanopy, rent on Prime.

• My Night at Maud’s (1969, dir. by Èric Rohmer) stream on HBO Max, Criterion.  

• Claire’s Knee (1970, dir. by Èric Rohmer) stream on Criterion, rent on Prime.

• Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974, dir. by Jacques Rivette) stream on Criterion. 

• Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962, dir. by Agnes Varda) stream on HBO Max, Criterion, Kanopy.