Nouvelle Vague (New Wave), a cinephile’s declaration of love by Richard Linklater

It has been almost twenty years since Richard Linklater has been in Competition at the Festival de Cannes. Nineteen to be exact, since Fast Food Nation (2006), the feature film in which the writer of the trilogy Before took viewers on a journey to the heart of the junk food industry. Needless to say, it has been an eternity for all the fans of this American filmmaker with his eclectic filmography and for whom narrative experimentation, from Waking Life (2001) to Boyhood (2014), was never an obstacle, but a way to remain free and to reinvent himself.

In Nouvelle Vague (New Wave), his thirty-third film, the American writer’s free spirit retraces the filming of À Bout de Souffle (Breathless), Jean-Luc Godard’s first feature film made during the summer of 1959. For the film, the director starts off his narrative a few months prior, at the Festival de Cannes, where the project was then conceived by Godard, driven by Claude Chabrol and François Truffaut, and honored this year by a Croisette that has fallen under the spell of their Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows).

More than the portrait of a man and his art, Richard Linklater portrays an entire generation of filmmakers and resurrects the spirit that infused this prolific period in film, symbolized by freedom of voice, improvisation, and an attachment to everyday poetry. “It’s the story of a personal revolution of cinema led by a man, and by everyone around him”, the filmmaker told Les Inrockuptibles.

Staying true to his obsession for the passing of time and to his adventurous artistic style, the director explicitly revisits this film movement that changed the history of cinema by using techniques characteristic of that time, between elliptical editing, black and white, breaks in tone, and hand-held cameras, to end up creating a docu-fiction in the form of a vibrant and inventive tribute. In this film, he presents a nostalgic declaration of love for cinema.