Nouvelle Vague Richard Linklater (Fr; 2025) Guillaume Marbeck, Zoey Deutch
viewed Tyneside Cinema 8th Nov 2025; ticket £13.75
old Macdonald had a farm…
Godard’s movies are always about truth; but Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague peddles the false.
Godard’s films may express his truth; but Godard’s truth is always grounded in the path of struggle. Linklater likes the way to be easy going. Don’t think just recreate and replicate. ‘Nouvelle Vague’ takes ‘A Bout de Souffle’ (BdS) and degrades it into a period costume dramas with a scenario that panders to a time line filled out with emotive pouting and dialogue lines that exploit best quotes from J-L G. Linklater’s film is act of manipulation, the false tricked out to represent the real.
I suppose you either like Linklater’s ‘Nouvelle Vague’ perhaps finding it has something to novel say about the process of film making – scripts actors directing; or you find it an empty vessel that under the pretext of honouring Godard’s making of ‘A Bout de Souffle’ (Breathless) simply exploits enlarges distorts manipulates certain aspects of the production to churn out cinematic convenience food fit for Netflix. A MacFilm.
‘Nouvelle Vague’ is presented as a more or less simple replication of the process of making BdS from pre-pre-production to the post production. Structured chronologically it leads us through Godard’s insistant selling of himself as director, through to his casting and crewing, the shoot and the edit. Guillaume Marbeck plays J-L G; Zoey Deutch plays Jean Seberg.
The film structures BdS as taking place in constant time a mechanical passage in which only the aspects of the story deemed screen worthy get on screen. So we have plenty of time with Godard’s push to direct, his casting of Seburg and then certain scenes in HdS. The scenes that make it into the scenario are mainly the crowd pleasing exteriors. But it is the scenes in the hotel room, riveting in their intensity that define Godard’s film. Viewing Linklater’s reset you wouldn’t know this. Linklater likewise skits over the editing. According to Godard’s DP Raoul Coutard, the film’s expressive vitality (in part due to Godard’s use of jump-cuts) was created in the editing room where Godard had an intuitive feel for how to manipulate his footage. But the business of splicing film is not sexy, so the cutting room is cut reduced to one short scene, difficult to comprehend where the editors seem to be initially shocked by Godard’s idea of breaking up and thereby exposing the filmic fabrication of continuity.
But of course Godard’s cutting through the shiboleths of film construction is honoured in absence by Linklater. ‘Nouvelle Vague’s ’ script is devoid of Godard’s wit particularly characterised by his use of graphics. With some filmic wit Linklater could have made a film that played fast with some of Godard’s ideas, including his politics. Less time with the dullness of replication more time having playing with Godard. Instead we have to turn our gaze upon on Marbeck and Deutch, doing their imitations going thorough the motion of walking in dead man/woman’s shoes.
Linklater’s final graphic at the end of ‘Nouvelle Vague’ reveals the extent to which he seems to hold Godard, the man the film maker the thinker, in contempt. It might be that he is unaware of Godard’s legacy or that his anxiety to draw down the money on offer from the French Government, led him to avoid making any political statements in ‘Nouvelle Vague’. The graphic, white on black, the last image of the film says that Jean Seburg made some 34 films after ‘A Bout de Souffle’….the implication being how beneficial her role in the movie had been to her career. Let’s all clap hands, nice one J-L G.
The salient fact about Jean Seberg, that surely must have drawn Godard’s attention was that at the age of 40 she committed suicide in Paris by overdosing on barbituates. There were however graphic reasons for her death.
Because of Seberg’s support for Black Panthers and other radical organisations in the 1960’s, Edgar Hoover ordered the FBI to use a programme of techniques to harass intimidate defame and discredit her. As part of this campaign the FBI created the false story that the pregnant Seberg’s child was not fathered by Romain Gary, her husband, but by Raymond Hewitt a Black Panther. The child died in her womb; its death haunted her for the rest of her life. Hoover also made sure she was was black listed in Hollywood and pursued her relentlessly for 10 years. After her death Gary called a press conference in which he blamed the FBI’s campaign against her for her deteriorated mental state.
This feels more like the story that Linklater should have filmed or somehow referenced in ‘A Bout de Souffle’. Jean Seberg ended up dead. Breathless; Out of breath; ‘A Bout de Souffle’ literally. Whacked by the FBI. As Godard said towards the end of his life: ‘Cinema is dead.’ Linklater’s film shows that Godard as usual knew what he was talking about.
adrin neatrour
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