""Is it a piece of shit or a load of shit?" asks Jean-Luc Godard (Guillaume Marbeck) at the end of Richard Linklater's Nouvelle Vague, as he and his fellow filmmakers sit watching his legendary 1960 feature directing debut Breathless (A bout de souffle). "The year's worst film," echoes his writer colleague Suzanne Schiffman (Jodie Ruth-Forest). "Will never be released," chimes in his friend and co-writer Francois Truffaut (Adrien Rouyard)."
"The scene is a callback to Nouvelle Vague's opening scenes, in which Godard & Co. sat around mocking the 1959 release La Passe du Diable after its premiere. Now, they smile as they ding their own movie; it's all meant at least partly in jest. But their exchange also speaks to a sly, uncomfortable truth about the moment: Neither Godard nor his colleagues are sure yet what exactly they've made."
"Linklater's picture follows the creation of Breathless, and it's a tribute to the revolutionary French film movement of the title, but it's also an extremely Linklaterian movie about a group of buds just hanging out and doing stuff. Which is somehow both a perfect and a counterintuitive way to approach Godard's debut feature. Sixty-five years later, Breathless's position as one of the most influential works of the 20th century in any medium is secure."
Richard Linklater's Nouvelle Vague follows the making of Breathless and interweaves homage to the French New Wave with Linklater's conversational, laissez-faire tone. The film stages scenes in which Jean-Luc Godard and colleagues watch and mock Breathless, then smile as they mock their own work, highlighting uncertainty about what they have made. The movie emphasizes camaraderie, improvisation, and the playful irreverence that defined the movement. Breathless is framed as a transformative work whose influence reshaped cinema; comparisons place it alongside major debuts like Citizen Kane and note Bernardo Bertolucci's claim that there was cinema before and after Godard.
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