Nouvelle Vague (2025)
First screened and reviewed in October 2025
Director: Richard Linklater. Cast: Guillaume Marbeck, Zoey Deutch, Aubry Dullin, Bruno Dreyfürst, Benjamin Clery, Matthieu Penchinat, Paolo Luka-Noé, Adrien Rouyard, Tom Novembre, Jonas Marmy, Jodie Ruth-Forest, Antoine Besson, Laurent Mothe, Léa Luce Busato, Pauline Belle, Jade Phan-Gia, Frank Cicurel, Blaise Pettebone, Pierre-François Garel, Côme Thieulin, Alix Bénézech, Jean-Jacques Le Vessier, Aurélien Lorgnier. Screenplay: Holly Gent and Vincent Palmo, Jr., adapted into French by Laetitia Masson and Michèle Pétin. In Brief:
Perhaps no pressing need behind it, but it nicely avoids idolatry or Schadenfreude. Stylistic execution is debonair.
VOR:③
At first, a well-appointed New Wave for Beginners. There's an audience for that, but this film grows in value and depth as it lightens up.
Slow to wriggle out from under a flat-footed script. By filming time it's pleasantly light in style and performance... and I'm glad it's neither a roseate valentine to all things Breathless nor an over-emphatic catalog of accidents and treacheries, as if to marvel that anything great arose from such chaos. Linklater de-dramatizes the act of filmmaking, which I found refreshing, and his core actors deliver on their assignment. In the same way depression shouldn't always be played as "sadness," a strained and at times unhappy creative collaboration isn't always about people lunging at each other's throats. I think the film's willingness to see genius as well as folly in relatively equanimous terms is its principal reason to exist, and I valued it on those grounds while also having a fairly merry time. The overall styling of camera, lighting, and design are delicious and spiffy, though I'm sure purists and historians will nitpick, and I won't push back too hard on anyone who finds it diaphanous, or digest-y, or lacking a clear sense of mission. And boy, do you have to push through the try-hard, Wikipedia-adjacent writing for those first 40 minutes. The script is by the same married team who served Linklater faulty foundations for Me and Orson Welles and Where'd You Go, Bernadette?, and while one of my favorite things about this director is his loyalty to longtime collaborators, I think he could afford to be a little tougher creatively on these two. Grade:B
(I originally wrote this capsule on Letterboxd, where you can comment.)
