Movie Details
| Title: | Nouvelle Vague | |
| Director: | Richard Linklater | |
| Year: | 2025 | |
| Genre: | Movie About Movies | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 12.27.25 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (13)
- Bad News Bears
- Before Midnight
- Before Sunrise
- Before Sunset
- Bernie
- Boyhood
- Dazed and Confused
- Everybody Wants Some!!
- Fast Food Nation
- Me and Orson Welles
- A Scanner Darkly
- School of Rock
- Slacker
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 12.27.25 | Internet | I've heard Blue Moon is the Linklater movie to see this year but this movie about the making of French New Wave classic Breathless looked fun to me. He shot it with what looks like a 16mm camera shooting black and white film presumably at the locations that Breathless was made (the road that Godard drives down early in the film also looks awfully familiar) starring actors that look a hell of a lot like the people they're portraying (at least those I'm familiar with). It's also all in French. I hesitate to say that Linklater shot it like a New Wave film but he did put some touches in there like having each character look at the camera for their introduction. It seems like today your personal taste often gets defined or informed by asking the question "Godard or Truffaut?" They wound up making drastically different kinds of movies and had a bit of a falling out after a time (the details of which I cannot remember), but while it seems like Linklater prefers Godard based on him making a movie about the making of Breathless rather than The 400 Blows, I love that he chose this moment where both filmmakers along with the rest of the Cahiers crew were still very close friends. And the making of Breathless is probably a better story anyhow. So, as someone who loves movies about movies, I loved this. It probably doesn't hit for people who aren't French and/or film nerds but for those of us in that category I had a really fun time both following Godard as he searched for innovation and living in 1959 Paris hanging out with Bresson while he makes Pickpocket and Melville while he makes... something (imdb dates suggest Two Men in Manhattan), and being in the Cahiers room listening to Rosselini espouse his cinematic ethos. The music is breezy and jazzy and everything works together really well. As for myself, I was always a Truffaut guy. Granted, I haven't seen as many Godard films as Truffaut's, but I like how Truffaut's story sense mellowed with age. I remember loving Small Change which follows children running around experiencing childhood and The Last Metro which is about a theater during WWII. His early films got attention for some of the same medium-bending innovations that Godard is more famous for but his later movies mostly celebrated gorgeous women. Of course, he died young so his filmography didn't have decades to evolve into peaks and valleys, but while I can respect Godard's influence and importance, I didn't enjoy watching his movies that much. But that's just me. This movie sheds some light on how drastically Godard wanted to disrupt cinema and I think he succeeded. |
