Director Richard Linklater has two new films out now, presented in meticulous period detail, each telling a story about a specific moment in 20th-century showbiz history. The first, Blue Moon, shows lyricist Lorenz Hart, having a drunken and jealous night at Sardi’s in 1943, the night Oklahoma! premiered on Broadway and marked the beginning of the Rodgers and Hammerstein era.
The second is Nouvelle Vague, about the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s French New Wave classic Breathless, which was shot in 1959 and released in 1960.
Blue Moon is the better of the two films, mostly thanks to its witty script and heartbreaking emotional payoffs. But Nouvelle Vague, which lands in theaters this week and on Netflix in mid-November, is very good as well. Both Linklater movies played in the recent Philadelphia Film Festival, while he also made an appearance in his capacity as an ambassador of the Weird Austin of the 1990s, in the documentary The Butthole Surfers: The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt.
Aside from the obvious showbiz reverence, Blue Moon and Nouvelle Vague share a few things, including references to both Casablanca and the song “My Funny Valentine.” There’s one big difference—while Lorenz Hart was dead just a few months after the night depicted in Blue Moon, Jean-Luc Godard lived more than 60 years after the events of Nouvelle Vague, passing away in 2022 at 91.
In Nouvelle Vague, Linklater has recreated the Paris milieu of Cahiers du Cinema and Godard’s many contemporaries, a group of young critics-turned-filmmakers who upended the French film industry and the wider cinematic world in the late-1950s and early-60s. Linklater shot the film in Paris, in black and white, and told the story mostly in French and with an almost all-French cast of non-movie stars. The exception is American actress Zoey Deutch, playing American actress Jean Seberg. While there are some scenes at parties with Truffaut and the other New Wave luminaries, the bulk of the film follows the production of Breathless, with Guillaume Marbeck portraying the 29-year-old Godard, Aubry Dullin as leading man Jean-Paul Belmondo, and Deutch as Seberg.
Throughout the production, Godard is obsessively dedicated to his vision, but not so concerned with finishing the film on time or on budget. It’s a similar ethos to many other films that follow the making of a great work, when we know throughout that it’s going to work out. Breathless looks different from most of them. The film, shot by David Chambille, looks amazing and is meant to resemble Breathless itself and the films of that time and place. Deutch, a Linklater veteran who co-starred in Everybody Wants Some!!, is the highlight as Seberg, who spends most of the film visibly annoyed with Godard. For the further, and tragic, events in that actress’ life, see the 2019 film Seberg, in which Kristen Stewart played her.
You don’t have to know all this history to enjoy the film. The last time I saw Breathless was in a college film class more than 25 years ago, so I’m sure there were plenty of Easter eggs I missed, just as Blue Moon doled out American musical theater lore in almost every scene. But New Wave connoisseurs, I’m sure, will find much to appreciate.