Nouvelle Vague

Transcending the period drama, director Richard Linklater transports audiences back in time to 1959 Paris to experience the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless.

It's Paris in 1959, and Jean-Luc Godard (Guillaume Marbeck) has been writing for Cahiers du cinéma. As his peers and friends around him begin embarking on filmmaking careers, Jean-Luc feels the pull. After securing a modest budget and the talents of François Truffaut, Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo, he begins work on shooting his first low-budget feature, Breathless, with no idea he’s about to change cinema forever.

Curator’s Note
Perfectly capturing the visual aesthetic of the French New Wave, Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague is an adoring love letter to the movement. Embarking on the project, he asked his actors – each impeccably cast to embody the major players of the moment – not to make a period film. Instead, he invited them to transport themselves back in time and enjoy being in the moment, working on an unlikely film they could never have known would transform the medium. This invitation to be transported back in time extends to audiences.

Unlike Godard’s Breathless, shot with an unrestrained freedom and looseness, Linklater approached his film with a painstaking attention to detail, proving that lightning can strike twice, but with enormous effort.

Nouvelle Vague premiered at the 78th Cannes Film Festival three months after Linklater's similarly transportive film Blue Moon premiered at Berlin.