Richard Linklater's Uncompromising Artists

"In "Nouvelle Vague," a new film from the director Richard Linklater, an impassioned young movie critic expresses his belief in what cinema could be-and frets about what he himself may never be. It's 1959, and the critic is Jean-Luc Godard, a soon-to-be leader of the French New Wave, a nascent movement of journalists who are trading in their typewriters for film cameras, aiming to ignite a cinematic revolution. But Godard, unlike some of his comrades, has yet to direct his first picture."

"And so Godard makes 'À Bout de Souffle,' or 'Breathless.' The story, originally conceived by Truffaut, is a thin, desultory affair, about a French hoodlum on the run and his doomed fling with an American expat. Before long, the movie will be regarded as a landmark-the rare début that, for influence, experimental dazzle, and pure cinematic intoxication, can actually stand alongside 'Citizen Kane.' The rest is history, but history is never foreordained."

"'Breathless,' Linklater told me when I spoke to him at the Cannes Film Festival, in May, is "a film that shouldn't really work." With "Nouvelle Vague," he wanted to remind audiences of the improbability of Godard's achievement. 'No one knows who that guy is,' Linklater said. 'He's a writer for Cahiers du Cinéma. He might be full of shit. He doesn't have much respect. That's how it feels to make your first film.'"

Richard Linklater's Nouvelle Vague dramatizes Jean-Luc Godard's shift from impassioned film critic to aspiring director in 1959. The film situates Godard among Cahiers du Cinéma journalists who trade typewriters for cameras to ignite a cinematic revolution. Godard remains untested while contemporaries like Claude Chabrol and François Truffaut are already directing celebrated features. The narrative follows the improvised making of À Bout de Souffle (Breathless), a deceptively thin story that becomes a landmark through influence, experimental daring, and cinematic intoxication. Linklater emphasizes the improbability of Breathless's success and captures the insecurity and audacity of a first-time filmmaker.

Read at The New Yorker