A New Wave origin story, and an act of love

SOME DAYS IT SEEMS WE LIVE IN A HORRID WORLD where most humans couldn’t give a fig about art. How many people in that world are going to care about a 65-year-old black-and-white movie—one that, for anyone who doesn’t speak French, requires the reading of subtitles?

- BY STEPHANIE ZACHAREK

Yet here comes Richard Linklater’s sensational Nouvelle Vague, an agile, witty, elegant picture about the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s cannon-shot of a debut, 1960’s A bout de souffle, known to English speakers as Breathless. Breathless is a movie that possibly only film lovers and bona fide old people care about. What current-day filmmaker would choose it as a subject? Only someone who cares. 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 giving a damn.

GODARD WAS JUST 29 when he made