Cannes 2025: ‘Nouvelle Vague’ is a winsome homage to Godard

It’s a bold move to tell a story about the making of one of the most influential—and most studied—films in cinema history, particularly one whose place in the canon marks a disruption of all the filmmaking conventions that came before it. Add to that the notion of an American director assembling this homage to one of France’s biggest icons and things could go horribly wrong… if it weren’t for the fact that it was Linklater behind the camera.

Over the last 30 years he has challenged the conventions of filmmaking in his own ways, most notably with his Before trilogy of films, all shot nine years apart to allow for the story (co-written with his actors) to naturally age and mature with time. His other speciality is capturing the bravado and insouciance of youth, which we see here in the form of a 29-year-old film-critic-turned-filmmaker who made his very first film in a span of 20 days without much of a plan.

Experimental and unstructured as Godard’s style may have been, Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague is not. But it’s also not trying to be. “You can’t imitate Godard. You’d fail," he said at a press conference at Cannes. Meticulously plotted and rehearsed, the film has a beginning, middle and end—in that order. (Another deviation from the Godard school of action.) It opens with Godard bemoaning how his fellow film critics (such as Claude Chabrol and Francois Truffaut) at Cahiers du Cinema made their directorial forays before him. Spurred into action by the fear of being left behind, Godard gets producer Georges de Beauregard to fund his debut feature based on a rough story outline written by Truffaut, and casts Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg as the leads.

Most of Nouvelle Vague is dedicated to the production process of the film, and how Godard bucked convention at every turn. Take for example: showing up to shoot without a script, avoiding rehearsals so as to capture his actors’ instincts, choosing to have key action sequences take place off-screen.

Though much of this is already well known and documented, what sells this particular peek behind the scenes is the cast, made up almost entirely of unfamiliar faces. Guillaume Marbeck is an incredible find; the unknown French actor is the spitting image of Godard, aided by the signature dark sunglasses that don’t come off for even a moment. Hollywood actress Zoey Deutch nails Seberg’s off-kilter American-accented French, and another unknown French actor Aubry Dullin rounds out the trio with his playful (and equally charismatic) Belmondo.

Shot on 35mm film in 1:37 Academy ratio, the black-and-white film was shot to look like the films of that era, meaning it also does not feature any camera movements or stylistic choices that didn’t exist prior to when Breathless (as it’s known to English-speaking audiences) was made. “In making this film, I felt like I had erased my own history," said Linklater. “I was going back to being in my late 20s making my first film. I also had to erase cinema history after 1959. So I was going back in time personally and cinematically."

The film keeps up a zippy pace throughout, though its periodic pauses to introduce seminal characters of that time—Agnes Varda, Jean-Pierre Melville, Robert Bresson and the like—start to wear thin after a while. Some of the strongest moments are when Godard butts heads with his producer, who is becoming increasingly worried that his director seems to be eschewing a formal narrative in favour of creating an improvisational rhythm all his own, and also has a penchant for shooting only when inspiration strikes (even if that’s just two hours a day).

Nothing about Linklater’s film is as audacious as Godard’s debut but it has a winsome exuberance that’s quite infectious. Perhaps where the film will be most successful is among young audiences unfamiliar with these French New Wave pioneers, and with cinephiles for whom films about films have always been catnip. It may not matter that Nouvelle Vague isn’t doing anything novel. It’s made with such sincerity and such a reverence for not just the craft of filmmaking but for the leap of faith required to undertake such a thing that it’s impossible not to be won over.

Back to the forest

Exactly 56 years after Satyajit Ray made Aranyer Din Ratri (Days and Nights in the Forest), his beautifully observed film about complex social dynamics between a group of young friends and strangers, a restoration of the classic was screened at the Cannes Film Festival.

The process of its meticulous 4K restoration was initiated by Wes Anderson, an avowed Ray fan, in his capacity as a board member on Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation.

In his opening speech at the Cannes screening, Anderson said, “Days and Nights in the Forest is one of the special gems among (Ray’s) many treasures. I first saw it 25 years ago on a very strangely translated, blurry, scratchy, pirated DVD from a little Bollywood shop in New Jersey. And I hope you’ll enjoy it tonight, perfectly restored, as much as I did then."

The film’s stars Sharmila Tagore and Simi Garewal were in attendance at the screening alongside Shivendra Singh Dungarpur from India’s Film Heritage Foundation, which supported the restoration process in collaboration with Janus Films, The Criterion Collection and the Golden Globe Foundation.

Recalling the sweltering summertime shoot, Tagore shares, “It was so hot we could only shoot from 5.30-9am and then again from 3-6pm. The rest of the time was just adda, it’s a Bengali word which means bonding and making friends…Sadly, Simi and I are the only survivors (from the cast); everybody else has passed on. So I will see my old friends on the screen and relive those lovely moments."

And in her closing words of thanks, Garewal said to Anderson and Dungarpur: “You’ve not only restored this film, you’ve made it immortal." 

Pahull Bains is a freelance film critic and culture writer.

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