October 2025

# Nouvelle Vague

Sherry Coman

Martin Luther University College, Waterloo, ON, scoman@luther.wlu.ca

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<figure><img src="image_1.png" /></figure>

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## Recommended Citation

Coman, Sherry (2025) "Nouvelle Vague," *Journal of Religion & Film*: Vol. 29: Iss. 2, Article 17.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.32873/uno.dc.jrf.29.02.17

Available at: https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol29/iss2/17

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# Nouvelle Vague

## Abstract

This is a film review of *Nouvelle Vague* (2025), directed by Richard Linklater.

## Creative Commons License

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This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

## Author Notes

Sherry Coman is the Director of the Centre for Spirituality and Media at Martin Luther University College in Waterloo, Ontario, where she also teaches courses in film, media and spirituality and also in gender justice. An ordained deacon in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada, she is also a writer, educator, and story editor with more than thirty years' experience in theatre and film. She works privately as a development consultant with writers and artists in film, fiction, and digital media and is the curator and creator of online devotional projects.
<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>Nouvelle Vague (2025), dir. Richard Linklater
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xWuVI9ctvU</figcaption></figure>

In Agnes Varda's 2017 documentary film, *Faces Places*, which explores spontaneously the capacity of the human face to reveal character, Varda makes a decision to take her filmmaking team to try to meet up with Jean-Luc Godard at his new home. When she arrives for what she expects will be a visit, Godard is not there and has instead left her a cryptic note written on his window, that hurts her with its allusions. She leaves a note back for him that makes it clear the pain he's caused, while also casually acknowledging his debt to cinema. It is a rare moment of critique from Varda, generally considered one of the most generous filmmakers of the French New Wave. In her lament, Varda remarks on how much history she and Godard shared together and why therefore his behavior toward her is not accountable.

The moment is not in Richard Linklater's homage to Godard, *Nouvelle Vague*, which was screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, and which tells the story of the making of his
1960 classic *Au Bout de Souffle (Breathless)*. But the moment's underlying current is, in the severity of Godard's way of being with others.

There are artists who are just not very likeable people, who nonetheless change the course of their art form. Some of that is connected to the way they make their art. One of the strongest aspects of *Nouvelle Vague* is that it doesn't attempt in any way to redeem Godard. It does, however, create a poignant profile of one of the great masters of cinema.

The film is also careful to make sure that all of the surrounding and supporting artists in Godard's world are equally noted for history and posterity. A continuing motif of the film is to have each new real-life character arrive in a portrait shot with their name over it. While we recognize the first half dozen names we encounter, most likely we will be less familiar with all of the remaining names. Yet Linklater wants to make sure that history remembers them. These are the people who upheld Godard in his work and made it possible for his vision and visionary style to come to life—and/or were highly influenced by him in their own work. Students of cinema will no doubt be able to go through *Nouvelle Vague* and match shot for shot with Godard's original, appreciating these underlying layers of creative contribution.

As in *Blue Moon*, Linklater's other film this year, performances are what drive and make the film work. Somewhere during the movie screening, it's possible to lose track of the fact that Zoey Deutch is not really Jean Seberg and that Aubry Dullin is not actually Jean-Paul Belmondo. Somehow, we are transported into this reimagining of them. It is the same with Guillaume Marbeck's Jean-Luc, who holds the challenging task of keeping his character realistically brittle, while allowing us deep inside his vision.

Ultimately the gift of this film is how much it liberates the real-life characters of those who made the films from their locked-in moments of cinema history. Seberg and Belmondo are
presented with innocent charm, but the movie never really tries to get to know them more deeply.

Seberg's marriage is depicted in brief brush strokes. There's no real sign of the inner turmoil that the actress would go through that would eventually lead to her early death. And yet, by dwelling in the simplicity of the chemistry and connection between the two on-set actors, *Nouvelle Vague* helps us understand how much Godard's underlying motivations—to break apart narrative conventions and reshape film grammar—rely on average moments in average lives. *Nouvelle Vague* carefully signals a close but chaste connection between Seberg and Belmondo that we come to see feeds Seberg's iconic final moment in the film and makes very clear that their own talents were as much a part of its success as Godard's direction of them.

Eventually and by a kind of cinematic osmosis, we come to understand what Godard was trying to achieve: not just a new cinema style, but a new rhythm for being an artist within the cinema arts. He talks often about rhythm in the film's dialogue and the importance of spontaneity and interrupting the expectations of cinema goers. These of course will become hallmarks of his films. Almost the only way we have to like him as a character is through this struggle to break through conventional rhythms. The film climbs inside that dilemma and does a good job of depicting its challenges. It's not that Godard is otherwise unlikeable, he's just not very likeable. We have to love his art in order to love him. And he's not afraid of the critique. Throughout the film, the filmmakers who write for the now-considered groundbreaking legendary magazine *Cahiers du Cinema* (Truffaut, Chabrol, Godard) have in-jokes about how cutting their own reviews of others have sometimes been. An artist's deep fear of being mediocre is part of what leads to radical departures.

In its essence, Linklater's film is trying to tell us that visionary ideas are born not in a sudden burst of ecstatic revelation, but in a slow process of understanding that has evolved over
many years. In having written for the magazine about the work of others for more than a decade, Godard, Chabrol, and Truffaut refined what they understand cinema to be—and what it isn't. They themselves had been film students for years and years prior to making their own films.

Linklater seems preoccupied this year with moments of the 20th century in which artists are in profound transition. In *Blue Moon*, Lorenz Hart is coming to terms with the end of his career. In *Nouvelle Vague*, Godard is reckoning the start of his. In both films, the artists are indulgent and selfish, weak and exacting, and frustrating to those around them. The redemption seems to be that somehow they made great art within that. It will be up to the viewer to decide whether the result was worth what it cost.

In his essay, “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” written in 1936, Walter Benjamin predicts that what he calls the ‘aura’ that is created between an artist and the artist's subjects and the canvas cannot be an experience that's replaceable. But when we stand in front of that work of art and indeed in the shoes of the artist, we experience something of the magic that was there at its creation. His concern about movies was that the audience doesn't have the chance to be in the filmmaking process and stand in the artist's shoes, because they are not on set when the film is made. He predicts that people will fill the gap for themselves by trying to imagine what the making of the work of art was like to the point even of obsession. If he were alive today, able to see the amount of fan-fiction and behind scenes b-roll YouTube videos that exist on almost any film or television show that is made, he would feel convicted.

In the spirit of that conviction, Linklater climbs into the soul of Godard by recreating set pieces from the film. This is sometimes very powerfully effective, especially in the film-within-the-film's hotel rooms scenes, with the intimacy of camera and actors forced to be in very close
proximity. Iconic moments from *Breathless* are perceived from a different angle from the one we know. The change in perspective helps us to see that moment differently.

Linklater's homage to the French New Wave is loving and deeply empathic. And it provides an encyclopedic opportunity for exploring all of the artists of this era. Godard's technique was to provide scenarios and to let the actors work with them, sometimes with highly scripted prompts, and sometimes improvisationally. In one memorable scene, Seberg has been trying to teach Belmondo an American dance. While they wait for Godard to be ready in an emptied French restaurant, she and Belmondo finally do the dance for their own enjoyment and rehearse it repeatedly. It is not a scene in *Breathless*. But perhaps Linklater is imagining how the now famous restaurant dance sequence in *À Bande Apart*, a later Godard film, was conceived. Godard appears to have drawn heavily from influential sources from literature and film, lacing his films and his direction with quotations. By inserting the dance sequence, Linklater is creating his own quotation: an allusion to another Godard master work. It's in these in-between spaces (that are not as heavily articulated as so much of both the outer and inner films otherwise are), that we can fully appreciate Linklater's own unique gifts. He is taking the traditions of cinema and making them his own.