Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague is a breathless but flinty ode to Jean-Luc Godard

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Nouvelle Vague

Directed by Richard Linklater

Written by Holly Gent, Vincent Palmo Jr., Michele Halberstadt and Laetitia Masson

Starring Guillaume Marbeck, Aubry Dullin and Zoey Deutch

Classification PG; 106 minutes

Opens in select theatres Oct. 31

If, according to Jean-Luc Godard, all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun, then Nouvelle Vague, the breezy new comedy dramatizing the French filmmaker’s early days making his 1960 crime drama Breathless, is a job well done.

There is a girl in the form of Breathless star Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch), an American actress seeking adventure and art in Paris. And there is at least one gun, wielded by rising French heartthrob Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin), who is cast by Godard (Guillaume Marbeck) to play the cocky criminal at the heart of Breathless. The cinematic math theoretically adds up, resulting in Godard’s New Wave masterpiece, one of the most influential films ever made.

Yet as with many things when it comes to Godard, there is the director’s deceptively simple and perfect image, and then there is the thornier, more challenging truth. (Just for starters: Godard’s gun-and-a-girl quote wasn’t original to him, but a cheeky paraphrasing of D.W. Griffith, another, earlier godfather of cinema.)

Nouvelle Vague director Richard Linklater seems to be well aware of this Godardian complexity. After all, the Austin, Tex., filmmaker owes his career to Godard – without the Frenchman’s daring and experimental pop art (not only Breathless, of course, but also The Little Soldier, Two or Three Things I Know About Her, and La Chinoise, as a sampler pack), Linklater would not have been inspired to pick up a Super 8 camera and make his 1990 debut Slacker. Which means no Dazed and Confused, no Before trilogy, and certainly no Boyhood.

And yet, Nouvelle Vague feels all too flinty – a disposable lark of a movie that betrays Linklater’s well-publicized appreciation and understanding of Godard’s sensibilities.

It is not a deep portrait of an artist, or even a crafty love letter. More of a panting, heaving, flop-sweat-drenched and years-late “in memoriam” tribute writ large, with Linklater so loudly singing the praises of his hero that he forgets, or rather chooses to ignore altogether, the singular and radical artistry that drove Godard’s cinema in the first place. Linklater is here for a good time, not a particularly long or thoughtful time. That gun can’t shine every day.

For some, Linklater’s big-hearted and very goofy admiration might be enough. Especially as he fashions Nouvelle Vague as one of his many amiable hang-out movies a la Dazed and Everybody Wants Some!! – just a bunch of like-minded friends looking to have fun with one another. But in this case, the friends are artists of the highest calibre (Godard, Francois Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Agnes Varda, Jacques Rivette), and the fun of it all turns out to be a touchstone of cinema history.

There is a painstaking authenticity to Linklater’s recreation of Godard’s 1960s era, to be sure. Nouvelle Vague was shot in black and white, in French (with the occasional English asides from Seberg) and at the same locations used for the original production of Breathless. The performers that Linklater has assembled are highly invested in not angering the gods of French cinema, whether they be alive or dead. Marbeck, in his first ever on-screen role, is appropriately prickly as the uncompromising Godard. Meanwhile, Deutch was seemingly born already possessing Seberg’s natural twinkle, and Dullin is as close to a dead-ringer for Belmondo as they come. (Or maybe he looks more like Humphrey Bogart, who is himself an influential touchstone of Breathless).

And yet the entire experiment feels limited, constrained by both unfettered admiration and nostalgia for a time that Linklater never experienced firsthand. It is a movie of limits, whereas Godard knew none.

That said, Nouvelle Vague is far from a tragedy, abomination or any other crime against cinema.

Even if the decision to premiere the title this past spring at the Cannes Film Festival, Godard’s home turf, felt like laying it all on thick, Linklater’s movie will – almost against all odds – inspire at least a handful of young moviegoers to investigate Godard’s catalogue and those of his contemporaries. (Although in the United States, where Netflix has the film’s distribution rights, that will have to all transpire through the prism of streaming, perhaps the most un-Godardian of mediums.)

But Nouvelle Vague’s admirers will need far more than this movie, a girl and a gun to go any further.