Avis des critiques

[Nouvelle Vague] only replicates the aesthetic of [Godard's] anarchic approach rather than transmitting a comparable air of experimentation in its own right... The excruciating attention to detail here perhaps feels incongruous because Godard’s film is itself a radical usurping of then-conventional cinematic standards.

Nouvelle Vague offers little profundity about Godard’s directorial decisions, keeping the man psychologically opaque behind his iconic sunglasses, and to the point of absurdity... Still, there’s pleasure to Nouvelle Vague’s winking affection for Breathless.

With “Nouvelle Vague,” it feels like [Linklater is] sharing his love of movies and one of the filmmakers that influenced him... Linklater not only pays his respects to Godard but also shares that adoration for his craft with his own audience.

[Nouvelle Vague is] caught between its intentions of reverence and an inability to assert a voice beyond the pastiche. Despite its impressive visual flair and committed performances, the film seemed overly preoccupied with mimicking early Godard’s black-and-white aesthetic while bending historical fact to mythologise its subject as a precocious visionary author.

There’s something inherently conflicting about making a movie about form-breaking that doesn’t break form at all itself... but that will only keep the most devoted acolytes of the master from enjoying this clever profile of his genius.

The flatness of a biopic template versus the sharpness of the material it’s about is nothing new... but Breathless is too distinct a statement and too dismissive of convention to be understood through such a didactic, slavish narrative approach.

The material could not be in better hands. Linklater with his first film in French has managed to assemble an amazing lookalike cast... Linklater’s sheer audacity in tackling such a revered figure as Godard, known as “the great disruptor,” shines through and knows no bounds.

[Nouvelle Vague] is the ultimate inside-baseball making-of movie. But even more than that, it’s a picture that stands strong on the side of art, of history, of working to solve the puzzle of things that maybe at first you don’t fully understand. It’s both a shout of joy and a call to arms. It’s all about the bold, muscular act of caring.

Nouvelle Vague feels less about the specifics of the French New Wave than it is about the indie scene Linklater came up in, which yielded its own share of auteurs who were once audacious kids themselves... It delights in its characters’ rule-breaking and playfulness and experimentation.

Nouvelle Vague, like Godard’s teaching, is a masterclass on how to logistically and psychologically approach an artistically bent cinema career... At best, [it] is the kind of movie that emboldens people to make films themselves, and even more so, to adopt filmmaking as a way of life.

[Nouvelle Vague] is a tour de force of nostalgic whimsy. It’s a beautifully crafted love letter to the period of French cinema in the late 1950s and early 1960s

This pleasingly mellow portrait of a bunch of kids making movies is an instance of defanged nostalgia — when it was an occasion to highlight the economic, political, cultural circumstances that made this kind of creativity possible.