"If they want the new wave, let's give them a tidal wave". If Godard once envisaged submerging cinema with his first film, it was indeed a tidal wave that overturned the Cannes 2025 Festival competition with the screening of Richard Linklater's new film, soberly christened Nouvelle Vague.
The first trailer for Nouvelle Vague reveals Richard Linklater's tribute to Jean-Luc Godard and the birth of the cinematic movement that marked the history of French cinema. It features elegant black & white, a recreation of the 1960s and a cast chosen for their resemblance to the emblematic figures of the era.
Nouvelle Vague is set to hit French theaters on October 8, 2025.
Synopsis: This is the story of Godard making “Breathless,” told in the style and spirit of Godard’s iconic film itself.
A great storyteller, the American independent filmmaker has turned his attention to the creation of this major cinematic movement in the history of the 7th art, with this visually charming French-language feature (shimmering black & white and academic format). Highly anticipated by festival-goers (a film about the Nouvelle Vague at Cannes is sure to get hearts racing), Linklater's film looks back at the 20-day shoot for Jean-Luc Godard's A Bout de Souffle, the totemic work of the movement.
1959. Paris is in turmoil. For almost ten years, Les Cahiers du Cinéma had been defending a certain idea of cinema. A new generation of filmmakers was emerging: Truffaut, Chabrol, Rivette, Rohmer, Rozier, Resnais, Varda and Demy, inspired by Rossellini's freedom of tone and image.
Far from the meta-didactic film we might have expected, Nouvelle Vague is a veritable bonbon that focuses more on transcribing the mad energy and intellectual and cultural effervescence of the period than on explaining in detail the making of a film, however anarchic it may have been. A running gag that runs through the film is Godard's propensity for shooting on the fly (script of the day written in the morning, artistic direction by voice, disregard for falsetto and seamless editing, the ultimate quest for the natural, the instantaneous and the unexpected in a single take).
"Do you want to do it again? Do you want to see the shot?" asks his cinematographer. "No" comes the mocking reply from the most punk of filmmakers, already busy with a thousand other new ideas. It's enough to unsettle the American Jean Seberg (genial Zoey Deutch), unaccustomed to the fact that the appearance of one character rather than another in the camera's field of view is decided... by a coin toss!
Magnified by a cast composed mainly of unknowns chosen for their (insane) physical resemblance to those they play - an excellent Godard (Guillaume Marbeck), but also a Belmondo all in mimicry, disturbingly similar - Nouvelle Vague doesn't museologize Godard but has fun, good-naturedly, with his character - well tempered, Linklater thus signing a joyful and excessive homage, without bowing but with vivacity.
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