During a particularly ebullient moment in Richard Linklater’s latest film, Nouvelle Vague, currently streaming on Netflix, a passerby sees two actors preparing in front of a camera on a Parisian street and asks what’s being shot. “A documentary,” Guillaume Marbeck as Jean-Luc Godard barks back, “about Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg acting out a fiction.”
Nouvelle Vague, which recreates the development and production of Godard’s groundbreaking feature film Breathless, knows very well that it is playing with myths. Whether this particular interaction actually happened is beside the point. Linklater’s big wet kiss to one of the most seismic shake-ups in cinema captures just what was so new about the so-called New Wave—and how every revolutionary filmmaker, like Linklater himself, remains in its debt.
During a particularly ebullient moment in Richard Linklater’s latest film, Nouvelle Vague, currently streaming on Netflix, a passerby sees two actors preparing in front of a camera on a Parisian street and asks what’s being shot. “A documentary,” Guillaume Marbeck as Jean-Luc Godard barks back, “about Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg acting out a fiction.”
Nouvelle Vague, which recreates the development and production of Godard’s groundbreaking feature film Breathless, knows very well that it is playing with myths. Whether this particular interaction actually happened is beside the point. Linklater’s big wet kiss to one of the most seismic shake-ups in cinema captures just what was so new about the so-called New Wave—and how every revolutionary filmmaker, like Linklater himself, remains in its debt.
Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Chabrol read a newspaper in the offices of Cahiers du Cinema in Paris in 1959.
Godard and Claude Chabrol read a newspaper in the offices of Cahiers du Cinéma in Paris in 1959.Jack Garofalo/Paris Match via Getty Images
The term Nouvelle Vague (the French name for this movement) was applied to a spirited group of film directors at the tail end of the 1950s into the 1960s who came at their craft after establishing themselves as critics, mostly writing at the iconoclastic Cahiers du Cinéma. Though no ID cards were issued for membership and the styles deployed by these artists were varied, a common cause these (mostly) young (mostly) men shared was a drive to disrupt what they felt was fusty, stale, established French cinema. They also helped popularize the auteur theory, which is now received wisdom that a film director’s body of work will have recurring themes and stylistic traits. Moreover, many in the group were in the vanguard of finding artistic merit in what most other serious critics dismissed as low art. For example, while Alfred Hitchcock had wide box office appeal (and even a best picture Oscar), most elites considered him unworthy of scholarship. The French critics were the first to revere him as a major artist.
If the New Wave had a specific, declared end goal, however, it was to achieve a revolutionary kind of realism. For François Truffaut that meant rich character dramas with sympathetic characters who may just happen to be lawbreakers. For Alain Resnais, dreamlike visual symphonies that today’s audiences would say were entirely powered by vibes. For Jean-Luc Godard, the Franco-Swiss director who died in 2022 at the age of 91, and whose landmark Breathless was largely improvised off a very basic plot synopsis, it meant not just a disregard for cinema’s conventions, but a distaste for them.
To give a concrete example, as dramatized in Nouvelle Vague, a crew member voices concerns about ignored rudimentary filmmaking guidelines during the fictionalized production of Breathless. “She wore a different striped sweater before”; “the eyeline is wrong”; “you keep crossing the line. When editing they will be looking the same way.”
“I understand,” Marbeck’s Godard says. “And I don’t care.”
Guillaume Marbeck as Jean Luc Godard in a film still.
Marbeck as Godard in a scene from Nouvelle Vague.Netflix
The scene Godard is shooting during that (fictionalized) altercation is the longest and most influential one in Breathless. In it, Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a low-level hood on the run from the cops, and his new American girlfriend, Patricia (Jean Seberg), banter and quote from books and listen to music and eventually make love during a lazy afternoon in her postage-stamp-sized apartment. I can tell you that I’ve watched the sequence well over a dozen times in my life and I’ve never once cared about any continuity errors.
There are a few reasons for this. The first is that by this point in the picture we’ve already been living inside Godard’s world, in which what’s considered “correct” editing is frequently dismissed for a collage effect of jump-cuts. Today we hardly bat an eye at such a technique, but in 1960, when Breathless debuted, one only saw such a thing when there was a malfunction in the projection booth. Godard was not the very first filmmaker to do this intentionally, but his use was the most influential.
The most famous sequence to use jump-cuts shows Michel and Patricia zipping around in a convertible with the editing energetically skipping through their journey. It trades a reproduction of reality in favor of a more realistic memory of the event. The scene is set to the movie’s omnipresent jazz score, mirroring Godard’s jazz-like attitude toward dropping predictable phrases from a melody in exchange for improvising.
The other key reason why Godard’s technique went over so well (and this is said outright in Nouvelle Vague) is that it’s hard to find two more photogenic people than Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg as they were during the production of Breathless in 1959. While fashion styles ebb and flow, there has never been a moment in the decades since the movie’s release that Seberg’s clipped blonde haircut and striped shirts, and Belmondo’s cigarette and fedora (themselves a direct nod to Humphrey Bogart), has not looked good. Breathless exists out of time. Plus, having Raoul Coutard—a former war photographer who had worked for Paris Match and Look—as cinematographer didn’t hurt either.
A girl with short hair kisses the cheek of a man in a fedora while smoking.
Belmondo and Seberg in a scene from Godard’s Breathless. IMDB
A girl with short hair kisses the cheek of a man in a fedora while smoking.
Dullin as Belmondo and Deutch as Seberg in a scene from Nouvelle Vague. Netflix
What’s funny about the movie’s longevity is that there is just barely a plot. Michel is a car thief who, zooming from Marseilles to Paris, speeds past some police and ends up shooting one. It’s never clear if the cop even knew who Michel was. Nevertheless, he’s now a wanted man, yet his primary interest when he gets back to Paris is wooing Patricia, one of at least two girlfriends. (He steals from another one during a brief visit.) Patricia is in Paris on her parents’ dime, taking classes at the Sorbonne, and working in a hard-to-pin-down capacity for the New York Herald Tribune. Sometimes they dispatch her to a press conference at the airport, but she’s also seen in a branded T-shirt hawking papers on the street.
Anyhow, Michel and Patricia talk about love and destiny and happiness, go to the movies, and quote Faulkner at one another until eventually the police get their man. François Truffaut wrote a short treatment based on an article he read in the newspaper about a similar case, and his Cahiers chum Godard, who was itching to make his first feature, was able in large part to secure financing if he stuck to Truffaut’s scenario. (Truffaut’s The 400 Blows was already something of a hit.) But when it came time to shoot, Godard improvised each day—oftentimes closing down production when he had no new ideas, stealing shots on the street, racing through cafeterias, and feeding his actors lines from behind the camera. (Shooting non-synchronous sound meant the dialogue was all dubbed in later.)
Lacking the money for dolly tracks, Coutard hand-held the camera and was pushed around in a wheelchair. In order to shoot on the streets but not catch glares from other pedestrians, they hid him in a supposed mail cart with a cut-out circle for the camera’s lens. (Nouvelle Vague reproduces this little trick, which for some fans might be like watching Beethoven dream up the opening notes to his Fifth Symphony.)
All this lore has led to much tumult between film production professors and first-year students over the years. Every kid thinks they can pick up a camera, romp around, and make Breathless without having to do any prep work. But rarely does one find performers with the charisma of Belmondo and Seberg, or the skill of a cinematographer like Coutard. Nor do they have the preternatural insight of what will look dynamic when ultimately up on screen.
Guillaume Marbeck and Richard Linklater on the set of Nouvelle Vague.
Marbeck and director Richard Linklater on the set of Nouvelle Vague.Netflix
There is no shortage of writing or documentary work attesting to Jean-Luc Godard’s massive ego. What’s remarkable is that Nouvelle Vague isn’t interested in getting nasty. (A recent Godard biopic, Michel Hazanavicius’ Redoubtable, has a little more bile.) Richard Linklater is one of the greatest directors to return to the “hanging out” film. The Austin-based filmmaker’s resume includes richly humanist work like Dazed and Confused, Boyhood, and the Before trilogy—all of which are extremely light on plot, but dazzle with their gripping, three-dimensional characters. He’s made entire movies that feel born from that long, “incorrect” scene in Patricia’s bedroom.
Nouvelle Vague doesn’t ape the editing style of Breathless, but Linklater did shoot on black and white film similar to what Godard used, and worked in French for the first time in his long career. More importantly, he’s maintained the same jazzy cool and youthful vigor seen in the original. His version of Godard is still a bit of a nut, but more of a Groucho Marx character than a menace. When he calls off shooting for the day to collect his thoughts, the cast and crew are annoyed, but then they go get a drink and talk.
It’s no surprise Linklater feels comfortable directly recreating some of the legendary moments from one of cinema’s odometer-turning eras. His own first film, Slacker, a plot-free cascade of monologuing freaks that premiered in 1990, could be said to be just as influential as Breathless. It was one of the first and most impactful films of the U.S. independent film movement, and predated the similarly chatter-heavy work of Kevin Smith and Quentin Tarantino. All roads lead back to the Champs-Élysées where Jean Seberg shouts, “New York Herald Tribune!”
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Beyond Breathless: 5 Additional French New Wave Recommendations
A film set in the 1950s.
Godard, Anna Karina, and Belmondo on the set of Pierrot Le Fou in France in 1965. Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
- The 400 Blows (1959), dir. François Truffaut: Most cite this as the first New Wave film, in which Jean-Pierre Léaud plays a fictionalized version of the director at age 14, skipping school and getting in over his head in the lawless corners of Paris. The director and star would revisit the character several more times across two decades.
- Pierrot le Fou (1965), dir. Jean-Luc Godard: The most succinct way to describe this movie is to say it is Breathless but more outrageous, breaks more rules, and in color.
- Cléo From 5 to 7 (1962), dir. Agnès Varda: As with most art movements of the 20th century, the French New Wave was annoyingly a bit of a boys’ club, but Agnès Varda was one of the female voices who cut through. Her second feature, shot in real time, follows a Parisian singer as she waits to hear back from her physician whether or not a biopsy will lead to a cancer diagnosis.
- La Collectionneuse (1967), dir. Éric Rohmer: The fourth in the director’s moral tales series, this languidly paced seaside story does little to dispel myths about how much time the French take off for vacation.
- Last Year at Marienbad (1961), Alain Resnais: If cinema has a Finnegans Wake, it might be this, a famously inscrutable but exquisitely framed, lush mystery set at a spooky chateau. Resnais’ work at the time stood in contrast to his speedy colleagues in the New Wave, but it did as much to upend what was previously expected at French cinemas.
