Another film about Jean-Luc Godard. After The fearsome by Michel Hazanavicius in 2017, it is the turn of an American – a Texan -, the aptly named Richard Linklater, who has made a good reputation with the romantic and loquacious trilogy of Before – the famous Before sunrise, before sunset and before midnight with Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke– and his family fresco filmed for more than twelve years Childhoodto address the icon of the New Wave.
Presented in competition at Cannes last May, the work recreates the filming ofbreathlessone of Jean-Luc Godard’s legendary films, released in 1960, which narrates, in the style of a Picasso, the adventures of a couple formed by a Hollywood star recently arrived in Paris (Jean Seberg) and a young actor (Jean-Paul Belmondo). Praised by some, anecdotal by others, this false biopic attracted a large part of the press, without, however, achieving unanimous approval.
Exploration of the “present”
For fans of the genre and the era -let’s also say the “nostalgic” ones-, new wave “A lost world is resurrected,” applauds Le Monde. The film, whose “brilliant” script was written by Vince Palmo and Holly Gent, avoids the easy mistakes of the biopic and celebrates, paradoxical as it may be, life, the perpetual present. “He does not erect mausoleums,” but rather “probes his own environment.”
And he continues: “The film never observes this filming as a moment of frozen mythology, but as a flame that must be rekindled before the eyes of the viewer. Linklater tells us: the most beautiful tribute that could be paid to breathless It is to make us feel the risk he took, the disaster that could have been. It was like all films: an inseparable mixture of chance and necessity, an author’s vision thrown into tough negotiations.”
“Homosexuality, audacity, naturalness”
The press also praises the choice of cast, which is based on unknown young people who look like their protagonists, but without cloning them: Guillaume Marbeck plays Jean-Luc Godard, while Zoey Deutch and Aubry Dullin play Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo. For Libération, it is thanks to its actors that the film acquires “its charm and lightness.”
It is also this happy-go-lucky tone that Ouest France and Le Figaro celebrate. The first points out that “this American in Paris [Richard Linklater] manages to capture the spirit of an era and turns its actors around without falling into intellectualism or the clichés of the time”, while the second asks: “We don’t know what is most praiseworthy in this matter: joy, audacity, naturalness.”
And Le Figaro summarizes: “Richard Linklater pays tribute to a generation, rediscovers the tone, the color of a blessed era. ‘Amazing’, Jean d’Ormesson would have said. To the list of praises one can add joyful, lively, nostalgic, fraternal.”
“Product derived from cinephilia”
But for Jacques Morice of Télérama, whose editorial team is divided on the issue, new wave It is just a “catalogue of uninteresting anecdotes” and “poor of imagination.” And he adds: “You choose: a product derived from cinephilia, a long clip, a fashion catalogue: magnificent, Jean Seberg’s ultra-modern haircut, his scarf, his sailor blouse. Welcome to the enchanted kingdom of pop culture. No insolence or aesthetic revolution, here everything is comfort. (…) The best tribute we can pay to the director of Pierrot the madman, I’m probably forgetting.”
The sociologist Jérôme Pacouret comments in Mediapart that “the film participates in an idealization of the cinematographic author” in the #MeToo era. Did Richard Linklater praise or discomfit too much Jean-Luc Godard, whom everyone knows is provocative – to put it mildly – even tyrannical? “[Son] The character never seems to doubt himself and recites aphorisms every time he is contradicted,” Ouest France laments timidly.
Libération, which feared a “hagiographic biopic about the budding genius”, admits that it questioned the relevance, in 2025, of a work about “a group of young people who are a little misogynistic (like their time) who brilliantly succeed in their robbery of dad’s cinema by giving (deserved) lessons to everyone.” But everyday life quickly swallowed up his doubts, letting himself be carried away by the “playful” breath of the film.
For Le Monde, Godard’s genius exists, but “it comes less from the man locked in his studio than from the sponge that absorbs the energy of his time to synthesize it.”
Source: BFM TV
