‘Nouvelle Vague’ Review: Linklater’s Time Travel

Richard Linklater, adept in making hangout films, achieves what—even in his best films—he comes only close to achieving: Time Travel. Taking us back into 1959, as Godard embarks on making not ripples but waves with his feature debut, Breathless.

As Godard puts it, the moral of many of his films lack cheerfulness, this one is full of cheers, which acts as a double edged sword: through his films, Godard offers not characters as much as himself as perceived by the means of cinema, projecting his stream of consciousness on the celluloid; Linklater aware of that obviates the personal, and deals with Godard as a part of the group, that I like to call as the Pups of Cinemathéque, the hithcocko-hawksians and their french new wave, the idea of new wave being to produce as many new directors as possible, their methods incapable of escaping their aesthetic or vice versa, reflecting the times they lived in, and what better feature debut depicting the intellectual capability of the New Wave than Breathless. 

The film goes through a series of crests and troughs, but the moment Coutard enters the film and those camera start rolling, that’s when Linklater gets in the zone, playing on his strengths by creating a chill hangout mode, painting a portrait of Godard, which though might not reveal much of Godard, it doesn’t atleast conceal much either, as Linklater stays true to the ficitonalised Godard as the way Linklater interprets him.

One can see Linklater cashing in on the joy of auteur-driven-filmmaking, and the crew tackling the technical complexities in order to find spontainety in expression as evident in À bout de soufflé. The casting all around is A+. Linklater was clearly having fun shooting this one and it reflects, the film comes to an end on a very heartful yet funny frame, now who’s going to dramatize the Truffaut v Godard fallout.

Nouvelle Vague is directed by Richard Linklater and stars Guillaume Marbeck as Jean-Luc Godard, Zoey Deutch as Jean Seberg, and Aubry Dullin as Jean-Paul Belmondo. The film is now streaming on Netflix, where you can watch it below:

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