★★★★ (4 out of 4)
A bunch of smartass kids who fancy themselves film critics decide they can make movies better than the old fart established pros. And it turns out they can. The time is 1959, the place is France and damn if the brats don’t succeed by making it all up as they go along. I’m talking about the French New Wave. And “Novelle Vague”—two hours of pure enchantment from Texas auteur Richard Linklater—is his wild, consuming love letter to that revolution.
Now in theaters before a Nov. 14 debut on Netflix, “Novelle Vague” is not a nostalgia piece. Linklater shoots the film—in French with English subtitles—with a present-tense immediacy as if everything is happening right this very minute. It certainly was for Jean-Luc Godard, 29 going on ageless when he shot his debut film guerilla-style on the streets of Paris with an American actress who mocked his arrogance and desperately wanted out of working with him.
The film is “Breathless,” a still influential landmark in modern cinema. The actress was Jean Seberg, an Iowa farm girl who never shone this brightly again on screen. “Breathless” also catapulted her costar Jean-Paul Belmondo to global eminence. As Godard said, “All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun." And Godard wanted to make it in a fast 20 days since his critic frenemy Francois Truffaut had just beaten him to the New Wave punch with “The 400 Blows.”
Linklater, born in 1960 when “Breathless” was released, directs “Novelle Vague” as a bracing tribute to the way it was and the way movies could be again if an insurgent band of outsiders set the course for indie cinema. Linklater’s 1990 debut “Slacker” caught a generation of bristling minds trying to overcome their own inertia. His later gems, including “Boyhood,” the “Before” trilogy and this year’s “Blue Moon,” have an internal combustion Godard would recognize.
You don’t need to know a thing about Jean Luc Godard’s 'Breathless' and the New Wave to accept Richard Linklater’s invitation to participate in the sweet agony and ecstasy of their creation. No true movie lover would dream of missing it.
“Novelle Vague” is written, directed and acted to perfection and looks exactly like the French classic film it is celebrating, right down to the black-and-white cinematography by David Chambille, jump cut editing from Catherine Schwartz and a sense that anything can happen.
All praise to a flat-out fabulous Guillaume Marbeck for capturing the essence of Godard—always with the dark shades and dangling cigarette—as an enfant terrible who thrives on shocking, embarrassing and annoying everyone in his vicinity. Marbeck is so good he practically reincarnates a man whose genius is never in doubt, especially to him. C’est magnifique.
And Zoey Deutch, wow. A lot of performances are called revelatory, but what the former Disney star does here truly is. She captures the fragility of Seberg, then 20, hidden under the Hollywood hard shell she built up after doing two pictures with directing tyrant Otto Preminger (the godawaful “Saint Joan” and the still sublime “Bonjour Tristesse”). Deutch even studied French for months to speak the language as Seberg did, with a flat American accent. Terrific work.
Praise too for the wonderfully expressive Aubry Dullin as Belmondo, a naturally ebullient actor who climbed the fame train with “Breathless” as a cop killer with a Bogart fixation and a yen for Seberg as the American girl who loves and betrays him. Deutch eerily recreates the cold closeup Seberg stare that ends “Breathless” on a note that started Godard’s reputation as a misogynist.
No detail is too small to escape Linkater’s attention. The actors all come up aces, especially Matthieu Penchinat as camera wiz Raoul Coutard, who literally tied himself in knots to supply “Breathless” with the documentary feel Godard wanted. That extends to the comic scene in which Godard hides Coutard and his camera in a food cart so passersby can’t see that they’re being used as unpaid extras.
“Novelle Vague” bubbles over with spirit and wit, giving the sense that Godard—scribbling lines he hands to the shocked actors just before they go on camera—is enjoying the improv anarchy that he sneakily knows will make him a force to reckon with. In the words of Godard acolyte Quentin Tarantino: "To me, Godard did to movies what Bob Dylan did to music. They both revolutionized their forms.”
Having directed nearly 70 features, documentaries, and shorts before his death at 91 in 2022, Godard is revered for his philosophy that films needed “a begining, middle and end but not necessarily in that order.” The Onion gave him a fittingly satirical obit headline: "Jean-Luc Godard Dies At End of Life In Uncharacteristically Linear Narrative Choice."
Linklater does something better by making a film to introduce Godard to a new generation. He deserves it. You don’t need to know a thing about “Breathless” and the New Wave to accept Linklater’s invitation to participate in the sweet agony and ecstasy of their creation. No true movie lover would dream of missing “Novelle Vague.” I couldn’t have liked it more.