Nouvelle Vague

A film about cinephiles for cinephiles is one way to describe ‘Nouvelle Vague’ (New Wave), Richard Linklater’s love letter to movies. You could also say that it is about the making of ‘Breathless’, which it is. But it’s truly, gloriously more. It’s about being young and alive, broke and audacious, lucking into friends who make you come alive, having each other’s backs — all while changing the world. In the 50s, a bunch of French film critics were busy discovering the joys of ‘middlebrow Hollywood commercial’ cinema, which was treated with disdain by a high-minded earlier generation. Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, Chaude Chabrol, Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard were among those who contributed to Cahiers du Cinema, a journal which published these rebels-with-a-righteous-cause.