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A Crisis or a Boring Change?
By Edo Choi

Nouvelle Vague
Richard Linklater, U.S./France, Netflix

“What gives me eternal hope and, in a way, what the film really depicts, is that our society still has a strong individual vitality at heart, intellectual and otherwise. We as individuals and as a society have the ability to revitalize ourselves.” —"The Art of the Interview: Self-Revelation or Self Torture? Richard Linklater Interviewed by…,” The Austin Chronicle, 1991

Richard Linklater’s films have always felt like ruminative affairs, their every moment the result of keen consideration of, and meditative reflection on, the matter arranged before him. His very best work, as Kent Jones once described Waking Life, “seems to be thinking itself through as it goes along,” and, whether a relative success or failure, each film takes shape according to this inquisitive impulse, aside from which they sport few of the recurring structural, plastic or tonal characteristics that typically demarcate a personal style. Of course, it is often repeated that Linklater is a master of the “hangout movie,” but beyond a sharp sense of how people tend to do that, no two of his entries in this vaguest of subgenres, which encompasses films from Andy Warhol to Hou Hsiao-hsien, is quite alike. Unlike most of his peers, a Wes Anderson or Quentin Tarantino say, a Linklater film has no narrative mold or visual signature. He is perhaps the most AI-proof auteur imaginable. His closest generational relative is poly-stylist Steven Soderbergh, a cousin both in versatility and sheer productivity (they are the two most prolific American directors of their cohort). Where Soderbergh is chiefly a genre technocrat, however, approaching every project like he’s solving a logical proof, Linklater is more philosopher than logician, posing questions with his films rather than devising solutions to them.

What question does Linklater’s latest film Nouvelle Vague, an account of the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s legendary debut feature Breathless (À bout de souffle), pose? In the New Yorker, Justin Chang reports that Linklater considers the film part of an informal cycle of artist studies alongside Me and Orson Welles (2008), Where’d You Go, Bernadette (2019), and this year’s earlier Blue Moon. Indeed, the first two and Nouvelle Vague were written by or alongside Holly Gent and Vincent Palmo Jr., while Blue Moon was penned by Robert Kaplow, author of the source novel for the Welles film. Typically for Linklater, none of these films adopts the same dramatic form or register. The earliest embeds a coming-of-age drama within a backstage comedy. The second is, on one level, an abrasive Woman Under the Influence scenario and, on another, a winsome mother-daughter tale, both wrapped in a quirky parody of tech culture. Blue Moon is a tragicomedy about a man of theater that wryly obeys the Aristotelian unities. Finally, Nouvelle Vague is a simultaneous behind-the-scenes caper and period pastiche. What unites these movies is a particular thematic throughline. One of Linklater’s widely acknowledged themes is the question of time and specifically, per Jones again, “whether to seize the moment, clarify it, or just live it.” Seen through this lens, the four suggest chapters in the stages of the artist’s life. With its story of a young man’s initiation into the world of artists, Me and Orson Welles would constitute chapter one (call it “boyhood”). Nouvelle Vague, depicting an artist’s flowering, is chapter two. Where’d You Go, Bernadette, a crisis of creatively stalled middle age, chapter three. And Blue Moon, which deals with decline and death, the fourth and, perhaps, final chapter.

In each of these films, the central relationship concerns the protagonist and the art with which they have become disturbingly absorbed, even if this relationship is mediated and negotiated by other characters. Thus the question of Nouvelle Vague becomes, if not André Bazin’s eternal “what is cinema?” then the more immediate and pressing, for the young Godard, “what is filmmaking?”

*****

It’s hard to make genuinely great, as opposed to merely good or acceptable, filmmaking look as though it came easily. Films are the strange fruits of an unwieldy technological process demanding prodigious command. The visions they conjure seldom feel truly casual or spontaneous, even and often especially when that is the desired goal. Two indelible exceptions happen to be Breathless and Linklater’s own 1991 breakthrough Slacker. Both announced the arrival of generational talents. Both appeared at hinge points between decades. Both embodied their zeitgeists with such naive and unaffected charm that they became instant landmarks. Of course, both too were anarchically rebellious responses to societies and film industries in crisis. Their endings suggestively invite us to a kind of collective ego death, an embrace of the psychic abyss at the other side of apocalypse.

In the age of Criterion and Letterboxd, both Godard and Linklater’s films have also become reflective objects of longing for later generations as we face our own moments of crisis. Whither our Breathless? Whither our Slacker? One thing’s for sure, as in 1959 and 1989 when those films were made, the mainstream industry, or whatever’s left of it, won’t be where we find them. Compare a few of the most impressive populist accomplishments of the past and present: Sansho the Bailiff (1954) and Nickel Boys (2024), The Searchers (1956) and One Battle After Another (2025). I cite these particular works, since the RaMell Ross and Paul Thomas Anderson films might both be seen as aesthetic redemptions of Mizoguchi and Ford’s studio era masterpieces. They are, once again but also more so than ever before, historically improbable works made within the system and possessed of both monumental cinematographic proportions and expansive cultural significance. As the economic horizon of the film industry continues to recede, such achievements feel vanishingly beyond the reach of most filmmakers, presumably not always for lack of ability or aspiration alone, but often also of means and opportunity.

Many of the most effective films to have emerged amid and in the wake of the pandemic have excelled at converting the ever narrowing constraints of a collapsed system of financing into unlikely advantages. Take an established international auteur like Jia Zhangke, repurposing two decades of his own outtakes to fashion a hyper-contemporary form of historical epic with Caught by the Tides. Consider the rise of lowdown, lo-fi enfants terribles like Radu Jude and Albert Serra, the former suggestive of a TikTok-pilled Godard who never eked out the bourgeois leisure time to cling to genteel modernist concerns like color and composition, the latter a fix-it-in-post Fassbinder, whose substitute for the thrifty analog artistry of Michael Ballhaus is DP Artur Tort applying Instagram-filter levels of color correction. This year came Dry Leaf wherein Alexander Koberidze transmutes the pixel schmear of his Sony Ericsson into a shimmeringly vibrant canvas purely by dint of an eye for provincial life worthy of Constable. Further instances abound, but arguably it all comes down to the early examples set by two pivotal millennial figures: Hong Sang-soo, who long ago traded in the cumbersome 35mm apparatus for quick-and-dirty digital in order to achieve, as Dennis Lim has written, “a liberation, to the largest extent possible, from the strictures of feature film production,” and once again Jean-Luc Godard, whose final five-feature cycle from Éloge de l’amour through The Image Book, capped by the posthumous shorts Trailer of a Film That Will Never Exist and Scénarios, traced a gnomic path of resourceful renunciation back to the mysterious first principles of Eisenstein’s intellectual montage.

These works are gratifying triumphs of utilitarian ingenuity over impoverished circumstance. Recently, however, I get the feeling that, rather unfairly, such innovation at the margins has begun to make those filmmakers privileged enough to afford traditional production values, or ambitious enough to aspire to them, while working in varying degrees of compromise with the very strictures to which Lim refers, look timid, complacent, unfashionably conventional, and, well, hopelessly lib by comparison. When it comes to PTA, the undeniable formal and political gambles of One Battle After Another have justified, at least for many of us, his command of a budget unfathomable to the majority of filmmakers while withstanding any charge of playing it safe. As for Ross, the rarity of an emerging Black filmmaker not only being entrusted with a prestige literary adaptation like Nickel Boys but also being granted the leeway to do so on his own lofty visionary terms, ought to justify itself. Scorsese’s late opuses have earned him his flowers for their sense of urgency as cinematic last testaments, while a Kelly Reichardt remains evergreen in critical favor for the extent to which she has managed to carve out her own inconspicuous niche of anti-establishment subterfuge. On the other hand, a certain vintage of director, positioned somewhere below the untouchable sphere momentarily attained by a PTA (just wait until he makes another Licorice Pizza), and without elder statesman status or still-valid subversive street cred, has started to acquire an aura of faded, boomer outmodedness.

*****

This returns me to the case of Linklater and his highly conspicuous new film brought to you by Netflix. “Sleek and easy,” “pleasantly slight,” and my favorite, “impeccably submissive,” these are just a few of the backhanded compliments critics have bestowed upon this homage to Godard and the New Wave. Shot by DP David Chambille in academy ratio on black-and-white 35mm stock—reportedly using the same model of Éclair Cameflex as Raoul Coutard himself—Linklater’s film is at least roundly acknowledged to be a technical marvel of period verisimilitude. Indeed, according to some, the film’s polished, VFX-assisted evocation of late fifties Paris and faithful approximation of the cinematographic artifacts of New Wave movies is already the problem. These critics find the luxury pleasures and iconographic appeals of this “moving mausoleum” spiritually discordant with Godard’s iconoclastic guerrilla original, and beyond that perhaps too tamely bourgeois for a movie about an artist who had a Maoist phase. On a deeper level, this objection seems to reflect a knee-jerk response to films too redolent with the artifice and affectation of pastiche, no matter how grounded such elements might be in research, how finessed in execution, how genuine in intention. We have reached a point where suspicion of “defanged nostalgia,” judged a conservative reflex, has itself become reflexive among a subset of critics and cinephiles to the point where the mere choice of pastiche as an aesthetic strategy provokes contemptuous dismissal. Particularly when the specter of AI looms, I do appreciate the concern, but for those of us who still find basic principles like thorough research, directorial finesse, and heartfelt intention among the tell-tale signs by which we might distinguish sentience from slop, Nouvelle Vague arrives as a charmingly human and refreshingly old-school, if not old-fashioned, piece of work. To invoke another luminary of the New Wave, it is a mid-budget marriage of truth and spectacle of which François Truffaut would have approved, the sort of which today has become the most endangered species of filmmaking. In short, it is a film made by the Slacker director who also gave us Dazed and Confused.

Ironically and fittingly, the narrative shape of Nouvelle Vague echoes that of Slacker, as well as of its spiritual sequel Waking Life, most of all. Those films enact a kind of Platonic dialogue by way of surrealist automatism, one random soliloquizing human encounter following and answering another to form a stream of perpetually transferred consciousness. While Nouvelle Vague is far more linear by outward appearance, telling the straightforward story of how a film came to be within its milieu, the movie likewise consists of such a chain of encounters, following an emotional logic just as unreal, dreamlike, and wonderful. Guillaume Marbeck’s feline Godard glides in and out of the movie, often not even showing up on time or when he’s expected, always purring some new mystical maxim through his raspy lisp when he appears, single-mindedly focused on his quest to grasp the spirit of the film he will make. On his way, he hangs out with his Cahiers du Cinéma comrades who wryly share their own aphoristic insights on the making of films. Here is Truffaut (Adrien Rouyard). Here, Rivette (Jonas Marmy). Here, most touchingly, Suzanne Schiffman (Jodie Ruth Forest). He has seemingly miraculous encounters with Rossellini (Laurent Mothe), Melville (Tom Novembre), and Bresson (Aurélien Lorgnier), each proffering him advice like Zen masters imparting koans. His mercurial behavior and cryptically categorical pronouncements try his practically minded producer Georges de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfürst) and his neurotic American star Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch), while amusing his laid-back leading man Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin), who strikingly echoes the many other surprisingly insightful jocks to be found across Linklater’s oeuvre.

Those who have charged that the above amounts to nothing but a Wikipedia digest without characters, only mouthpieces for famous quotes and “easter egg” cameos to satisfy nerdy cinephiles, are missing the point. Linklater glosses over the storylines—the potential rivalry between Godard and Truffaut, the on-set romance between Seberg and Belmondo—that more conventional biopics would magnify and inflate. The conflicts between Godard and Beauregard, and Godard and Seberg, here only signify in so far as they represent the reasonably exasperated reactions of normal people to the maddeningly impenetrable nature of Godard’s obsessive journey, his restless seeking and questioning after the nature of filmmaking, which finally is the whole of the drama.

Godard himself embodies a slacker avant la lettre: “The dictionary defines slackers as people who evade duties and responsibilities.” Linklater wrote for The Austin Chronicle in 1991: “A more modern notion would be people who are ultimately being responsible to themselves and not wasting their time in a realm of activity that has nothing to do with who they are or what they might ultimately be striving for.” By the same token, the appropriately urgent wisdom of Nouvelle Vague lies in its appreciation that no such slacker genius emerges in a vacuum. Only through the cultivation of communities of such rich intellectual and artistic ferment as those which momentarily came together against all odds in 1950s Paris and in 1980s Austin, may we hope to see a few slacker geniuses surface in our own desperately fallow times.