Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague is the second of his historical films to hit screens in 2025. Like Blue Moon it revolves around a flashpoint in twentieth century culture – the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, which ushered in a new era of cinematic language. Godard is played by Guillaume Marbeck, Jean Seberg is played by Zoey Deutch, Jean-Paul Belmondo is played by Aubry Dullin, and a plethora of other actors play the rest of the Cahiers du Cinema crew, all of whom are formally introduced with an intertitle. Holly Gent and Vincent Palmo’s script draws heavily on Godard the Cahiers critic and is peppered with aphorisms from Godard’s own writing: “The best way to criticise a film is to make one,” “All you need for a film is a gun and a girl,” “Reality is not continuity.” Another character observes that Godard “was never not making film essays,” and Linklater’s own film also sometimes feels like a cinematic essay, especially in its opening sections, paying homage to a historical moment.

All of which is to say that Nouvelle Vague is a quintessential Cannes film – a memory palace for the first generation of Cannes audiences and critics. The first act is set partly in Cannes, where Godard finds himself adrift, the last of the major Cahiers critics not to make a major film, and as he wanders through the seaside resort, the film oozes nostalgia for the hermetic insularity of the Festival before the streaming era. Godard is particularly desperate to see the premiere of The 400 Blows at Cannes and Linklater shows us the closing sequence in situ in this original venue, blending the ocean of Truffaut’s vision with the ocean of Godard’s rambling. In Gilles Deleuze’s terms, these elliptical walks around Cannes form Godard’s first “trip-ballad” and so become a blueprint for the erratically picaresque trajectories of his New Wave protagonists. Cannes is also where the film community prophecies Godard’s greatness – “Cannes is not ready for your brilliance, Mr. Godard!” – and by implication, where his canonical status is most enshrined. Sometimes that Cannes-Cahiers synergy evokes awe but more often this plays more like Cannes fluff, or a Cannes geezer pleaser, hitting every predictable beat in the kind of solipsistic cinephilia that goes down so well at the Festival.

That all makes for an inoffensive pretentiousness – the bigger problem, at least during the first half, is that there’s just not much tension here. Godard wanted to make a masterpiece that changed cinema, and he succeeded in his mission. Without a driving crisis, Linklater’s film often lapses into reenactment rather than dramatisation, a protracted name-dropping that turns this into a kind of Avengers: New Wave or New Wave Extended Universe. Sometimes this creates a more memorable nostalgia for the cinema effect of Godard’s period, for the unquantifiable experience of actually being in a movie theatre. In that respect, the film works well to capture the style, pose and aura of the cinematic celebrity – be it star or director. Often the pathos of Godard’s script overlaps with the poetry of his directorial cues, such as his determination to create the saddest shot in the history of film.

Interestingly, this aimlessness, which limits the first half of the film, becomes an asset when it totally dissipates in the second half and thereby reimagines Breathless as a precursor to the slactivist manifesto of Linklater’s earliest films. As Godard becomes more unpredictable in his shooting schedule, the actors and the film start to blur into a dispersed hangout at the threshold of the camera, especially since Godard encourages them to chat during filming, knowing that their voices will be dubbed over later in the production. Godard becomes a kind of flaneur, wandering around Paris, filming in a semi-spontaneous manner, and this rhythm is essential to Breathless, even if it is not directly visible in it. Only between the film and its audience, Linklater suggests, can we properly glimpse Godard’s effort to “seize reality at random” and remain “captive to the instantaneous and spontaneous.” Like Slacker, in particular, Breathless becomes a participatory text, precipitously positioned at the threshold between film and life, inextricable from the audience who is watching it at any one time. For all the stuffiness of the first half, or perhaps because of it, Linklater spends the second half attempting to extricate Breathless from the canonical apparatus of repertory screenings, boutique DVD collections and hi-def screenings, and restore it to its original symbiosis with its audience, along with its inherent openness as a text, which Godard discovers here in his iconic match-cuts, and their insistence on destabilising “reality.”

In the end, then, Nouvelle Vague is a tribute to the place Breathless holds in Linklater’s slacker imaginary – it is the original slacker film – and it made me realise what strong connections there are between, say, the neo-trip-ballad of the Before Sunrise sequence and the legacy of the New Wave, something that was less visible to me when I first watched these films in the 90s. Interestingly, too, the things I sometimes find irritating about Linklater, especially the incessant yet inane talkiness, the over-estimation of what is interesting in conversation, is present here too, in the form of Godard’s continuous affectations, which are often brilliant, but just as equally banal, despite the double takes they seem to engender from everyone around him. A strange film, then, not quite a historical dramatisation, nor a cinematic essay, not a straightforward tribute, but Breathless as filtered to us through Linklater’s imagination, through Godard’s unimagined progeny.