Director: Richard Linklater

Stars: Guillaume Marbeck, Zoey Deutch, Adrien Rouyard, Aubry Dullin, Antoine Besson

Taking its stylistic cues from the movement itself, Richard Linklater’s affectionate tribute to Nouvelle Vague focuses on the making of Godard’s mould-breaking ‘Breathless’. We are introduced to Godard and his fellow Cahiers du Cinema critics, Francois Truffaut (Rouyard) and Claude Chabrol (Besson) in 1959 at a screening of Georges de Beaugard’s ‘La Passe du Diable’. At the afterparty, Godard, who hated the film, pledges to become a film director. Truffaut has already launched his directorial career with his debut ‘The 400 Blows’, the toast of Cannes. Invigorated by the success of his friend’s film, Godard sets about raising funding for his first film, the script of which is inspired by reports of petty car thief Michel Portail and his American girlfriend with Truffaut providing an outline. While Godard cajoles financiers and performers onto the project, he receives counsel from other directors, including Jean-Pierre Melville, Roberto Rossellni and Robert Bresson. Filming in gorgeous black and white, Linklater infectiously conveys the auteur’s iconoclastic approach as Jean-Luc gleefully tears up the rule book to the bafflement/admiration of his colleagues. Newcomer Guillaume Marbeck, first in an uncanny selection of lookalikes, is a seductive Godard, given to imperiously dispensing sometimes gnomic epigrams, but brittle and uncertain too, and the picture fizzes with that era’s playfulness & mischief.

David Willoughby

Follow David on Bluesky @davidwilloughby.bsky.social