From November 19th to November 30th, the Irish Film Institute’s French Film Festival returned for its 26th year. Ireland’s largest French cultural event included 22 Irish premieres across genres and welcomed guests like Jean-Baptise Bonnet, Lucile Hadžihalilović and Samuel Kircher along with their films. A very special film that played at the festival paid homage to the cinematic mastercraftsman Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 debut, Breathless. Richard Linklater’s fictional documentary Nouvelle Vague (2025) is a comedy drama that explores the production of Godard’s defining example of what is now known as French New Wave. The film, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on May 17 earlier this year, was screened at the IFI on November 29th. It turned out to be an intoxicatingly chic, on-the-nose-in-a-cinephile-fashion expert examination of the creation of Breathless.
The film opens with a stuffy Godard swaggering around the afterparty of the film premiere of La Passe du Diable pledging that he must become a film director just like his other colleagues at Cahiers du Cinema have. Breathless was filmed in a matter of weeks on a tight budget, based on an outline from fellow critic at Cahiers, Françoise Truffaut (Adrien Rouyard), who had released his successful The 400 Blows the year before. Godard and producer “Beau Beau” agree on a shoestring budget to produce the film, which only requires “a girl and gun”. Godard himself, played by Guillaume Marbeck, is constantly muttering existential tit-bits, and pouting about cinema and art. Rolling Stone paints him as “the hungry Parisian with the sunglasses and the bottomless reservoir of pithy maxims [who] is more than ready to make his mark”.
Interestingly, Linklater’s Godard does not remove his sunglasses throughout the entirety of the film. He is the picture of the misunderstood artist, moving around with an improvised script and a handheld camera. The shoot for Breathless begins, punctuated by texts announcing the number of days (“Jour 1”) giving the film a journalistic feel. These days are often cut short to accommodate Godard’s authentic inspiration and dedication to realness. Breathless, starring the American Jean Seberg and boxer Jean-Paul Belmondo, was shot guerrilla style on the streets of Paris. Aubry Dillon plays Belmondo and Zoey Deutch, Seberg in Linklater’s version. The actors do not need to recite lines since dialogues are dubbed later in the studio, so they riff about Godard’s eccentricities while breezily walking through Parisian streets. The two show amazing chemistry, both during filming and in-between, and their playful rapport borders on flirting.
Linklater’s cinephile drama is shot in monochrome, further immersing audiences into the nostalgia of French New Wave. He includes cue marks as well, which were used to tell projectionists when to changeover reels, coyly painting a picture of the period. But there is a sense of irony to the film, with Linklater and the audiences knowing that Godard would have hated it. It is more a stylistic homage as opposed to a homage to Godard himself, in the way it adopts the central tenets of Nouvelle Vague. The real life characters, for example, are introduced with static portrait shots on the screen and scenes often begin with a mention of their names. Linklater throws in more 1960s touches with cigarette burns on the reels, allowing the intoxication of that era to imbue the film. Many of his moments are exact imitations of Godard’s movie, giving audiences an intimate view of the before, during and after of several legendary shots. He includes little details as well, such as when a tea cup makes its way into a scene where it previously wasn’t. These details are essential to painting the picture of a typical Nouvelle Vague film.
Linklater closes his film with Seberg’s iconic improvisation: “C’est vraiment dégueulasse,” which is translated as “you make me want to puke.” The moment feels cathartic, allowing the skeptical Seberg to realize Godard’s vision, and to let the neurotic Godard see all the pieces come together. Linklater’s homage is tastefully done and makes for a perfect viewing experience for cinephiles curious to witness the making-of of the remarkable films of the French New Wave. For all others, the IFI French Film Festival offered a wonderfully programmed retrospective on a New Wave director himself, Claude Chabrol.
