‘Nouvelle Vague’ review: Only Linklater could make a film this faithful

It’s wonderful that Richard Linklater got the idea to make “Nouvelle Vague.” What’s more, it’s extraordinary that studios put up the money for it – an American film almost entirely in French and shot in black-and-white. That Linklater went to such pains to find actors who resemble their real-life counterparts is also remarkable.

So please understand that this is not a negative review.

That said, the best things about “Nouvelle Vague” – following “Blue Moon,” it’s Linklater’s second movie released in as many weeks – are its concept, its audacity and its fidelity to history. As an actual minute-by-minute, scene-by-scene experience, you will probably enjoy most of it. But here and there, you’ll be rooting for it more than liking it.

The film tells the story of the making of “Breathless,” the 1960 French New Wave classic that launched the career of director Jean-Luc Godard. At the time, Godard (Guillaume Marbeck) was a movie critic at Cahiers du Cinema, an influential film magazine in which all the young critics went on to important careers as filmmakers. Godard’s colleagues there included François Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol and Jacques Rivette.

As the film begins, Godard is the only one of his colleagues not to have made a feature film. But an opportunity presents itself after Truffaut has brilliant success with his breakthrough movie, “The 400 Blows” (1959). Godard gets financing to film a scenario he and Truffaut had developed, about a crook who has a brief and disastrous relationship with a young American woman in Paris.

In a way, “Nouvelle Vague” is something familiar – a movie about movies. But unlike most movie industry stories, the treatment isn’t caustic. Though Godard is presented as an eccentric who seems to be making a classic by accident, the film’s overall feeling is celebratory. Linklater portrays Paris circa 1960 as a magnificently creative cauldron in which a generation of young people came together and changed cinema, mostly for the better.

The more you know about this era, the more you will appreciate the details. Alix Bénézech appears on screen for no more than two minutes, playing the French actress Juliette Greco, but she looks exactly like the woman she’s playing. Until you get used to it (that takes about 45 minutes), it’s genuinely exciting to see an era so lovingly and faithfully rendered. Marbec has Godard’s idiosyncratic lisp down, and the black-and-white cinematography looks exactly like that of “Breathless.”

But Linklater’s style is nothing like Godard’s, and that’s for the best. A disjointed, slapdash movie about the making of a disjointed, slapdash movie would’ve been, needless to say, too disjointed and slapdash. In his soul, Linklater is not a Godardian filmmaker. If anything, he is more like Truffaut, with his emphasis on relationships, his awareness of the preciousness of the moment, and his wistful sense of time’s passage.

More Information

“Nouvelle Vague”: Comedy-Drama. Starring Guillaume Marbeck and Zoey Deutch. Directed by Richard Linklater. (R. 106 minutes.) In theaters Friday, Oct. 31. Premiers on Netflix On Nov. 14.

The problem is that Linklater is working off of a screenplay that provides little tension. Will they ever finish the movie? We know they will, so we can’t worry about that. Will Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch) get fed up and walk off the film? We know she won’t, because we’ve seen “Breathless.”

By the middle of “Nouvelle Vague,” we realize that it’s simply going to be the record of a film shoot, from day one through day 20, and by day 10 or so, we share with the film’s characters desire for Godard to pick up the pace.

Still, I never expected to go back in time to watch Godard direct “Breathless,” and now I feel like I did.

Mick LaSalle is the film critic emeritus of the Chronicle. Email: [email protected]

This article originally published at ‘Nouvelle Vague’ review: Only Linklater could make a film this faithful – or this frustrating.