There are few things that embody the spirit of Cannes more precisely than the experience of watching a film in which the characters watch a film in the same theatre you’re viewing that film in. This mix of sickening self-obsession and undeniably alluring glamour is part of what makes attending the festival so addictive. And it’s this exact mix of qualities we see present in the protagonist of Richard Linklater’s 2025 Palme d’Or contender, Jean-Luc Godard. Nouvelle Vague follows the young Godard on a quest to complete his first feature film, Breathless. Anyone familiar with that film, or with any sense of the context surrounding the development of French New Wave cinema in the late 1950s, will recognize many of the scenes and characters portrayed in Linklater’s ode to the storied film movement. Nouvelle Vague is stylish and entertaining at its best, and at its worst a little too esoteric in its seemingly pointless commitment to reenacting this already well-documented period in cinematic history.
Nouvelle Vague is not a film about what it means to be a film critic, or even what it means to be a filmmaker, but rather what it means to be both a critic and a filmmaker—a totally different animal. It’s one thing to level the work of an artist with a few paragraphs of carefully constructed, biting prose, and quite another to create art as a form of criticism in and of itself as Godard sets out to do. His task is one of putting his money where his mouth is, wearing dark sunglasses with a cigarette dangling from his lip all the while.
In Linklater’s film, Godard’s the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed kid with no real work to justify his massive ego. During an early scene following the premiere of a film they unanimously pan, a partygoer refers to Godard as the “real genius” of the Cahiers du Cinema cohort. But she’s not referring to the man’s cinematic oeuvre—in the film, he hasn’t yet made his first feature. She’s referring to his work as a critic, and gesturing to the fact that his self-delusions of greatest have yet to be proven wrong.
This Godard embodies the petulant child as well as the wunderkind; he spouts the regretful refrain of not having yet directed a film of his own while sitting by and watching such colleagues as Francois Truffaut achieve early-career success as part of the titular New Wave of French Cinema. Godard’s a would-be revolutionary artist with two seemingly contradictory drives: to emulate the masters of cinema he has worshipped his entire life, and to do his darndest to break the conventions of style and practice that mainstream filmmaking had adopted as its standard. We consequently spend the movie following Godard’s crazy and seemingly unfounded whims; he ignores rules of continuity, he establishes a distinct editorial rhythm by employing jump cuts, and he refuses to shoot according to a set schedule or even provide his actors with a script in advance. He shoots his film on odd stock with no lighting or sync sound. He has that annoying quality of infuriating every single person but, but still ultimately succeeding at making (as the closing titles declare) one of the most influential films of all time. Naturally, this outcome will not come as a surprise for even the most vaguely cinematically-literate viewer—Linklater’s film is all journey, no destination.
Consequently, the film doesn’t have anything particularly profound to say about this world or the artists and critics who inhabited it (other than that they’re quite cool), though it’s certainly fun to see their exploits play out on the big screen. But it’s hard to feel too angry with Linklater for indulging his skills in a project that feels more than a touch self-indulgent, especially when the execution is so darn entertaining. But creating entertaining cinema has long been his practice: from his formidable collection of endlessly rewatchable hangout movies, to the more dramatically charged (but still very watchable) works like Boyhood or the Before Trilogy. Nouvelle Vague, however, feels most closely akin to Linklater’s largely unremembered 2008 period piece, Me and Orson Welles, in which a young, egoistic Welles schools a teenaged actor in the ways of love and art. Linklater seems to be fascinated by such larger-than-life personas, and the ways in which these characters get away with outlandish and cruel behavior by virtue of purported “genius.”
It’s unlikely that Linklater sees himself as a successor to the likes of Godard or Welles (I doubt that anyone who believes this of himself could pull off a film that consciously refuses to take itself or its subject too seriously), but more likely that he simply worships this mythos of the radical artistic genius: a person who is both a creator of great and important work but is also themselves a character with such a precisely constructed and memorable presence that the image of this individual might very well outlast the work itself.
All of this begs the question—why make this movie at all?
Nouvelle Vague is a movie about the movies, and specifically, a movie about anyone who knows what it’s like to feel so overwhelmingly compelled to make movies. Linklater is clearly drawn to the lore of the New Wave French cinema movement for a reason—the independent spirit that rejects the rules and insists upon the simple drive to just go out and make films. Just doing it. A bunch of kids running around Paris with a movie camera shooting whatever they feel like on any given day.
There’s a kind of freedom we lose when we leave behind the days of shooting a short film with our buddies in the backyard of someone’s house and, say, enroll in film school. There’s a loss of that lack of fear that made it seem that in art, anything was possible. Godard’s gift (as well as his curse) is that he hasn’t abandoned these delusions. He’s allowed them to skyrocket himself to the heights of self-importance. And yet the closing credits don’t make an overstatement when they describe the lasting impact of his film upon cinematic history.
A late scene between Truffaut, Charbrol and Godard includes mention of the ways that film allows them to escape their reality, but also clarifies that the experience of seeing a film does not—and should not—relieve the fear of actually making one. It’s not easy to write film criticism, but engaging with a movie in this way feels much safer than the act of actually going forth and making a film of one’s own. The resistance to the vulnerability and precision of vision required to do so is temporarily quelled when we get wrapped up in watching a movie, but we can never truly scratch that creative itch in any way other than through the self-flagellation of filmmaking. This sentiment lies at the heart of Linklater’s project; through which he reminds us that sometimes in art, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
