On March 18, the AFSR Ciné-Club will present an in-person screening of the 2025 film Nouvelle Vague, directed by American Richard Linklater, in French with subtitles. It’s a wonderfully imagined parachute into the 20 days of the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s groundbreaking 1959 film Breathless (À bout de souffle). With love and humor, Linklater recreates a time when Godard and his entourage of fellow filmmakers, actors, producers, and crew were making history on the streets of Paris.
The screening will start at 3:00 pm sharp on Wednesday, March 18, in the AFSR Grande Salle, at 1011 2nd Street in Santa Rosa. A bilingual discussion, led by Peter Zingg, will be held immediately after the film.
The event is free, and popcorn and refreshments will be served. If you come to the event, we remind you to park only on the street, not in The Spa Art lot next to the AFSR building. They have threatened to tow away unauthorized cars there.
Richard Brody, writing in the New Yorker, said:
A film about a great director and his ensemble, “Nouvelle Vague” is a vision of auteurship itself, of the risks that filmmakers incur in order to seize the freedom needed for their art—the freedom, above all, to choose their methods and invent their own system. The corollary is in the conflicts that such directorial freedom causes with collaborators, especially the actors. Linklater’s film asserts, gently but unbendingly, that a movie isn’t made for the actors’ pleasure, and that their enjoyment of the experience is no measure of the results. As the shoot of “Breathless” grows increasingly chaotic, Suzon Faye (Pauline Belle), the script supervisor, wonders whether the footage can be edited into a coherent film. Raoul Coutard (Matthieu Penchinat), the intrepid cinematographer, is unfazed, saying of the stars, “Good thing the camera loves these two.” If the camera loves the stars, it doesn’t matter whether the stars love the job; the director has taken care of business. “Nouvelle Vague” isn’t a portrait of Godard by Linklater but a feature-length thank-you note, from Richard to Jean-Luc, for freeing him to make films his own way.
The film just garnered the Best Director award at the 2025 César awards. If you would like to see more films like this one, we recommend:
- Day for Night (La nuit américane; 1973), Francois Truffaut, apparently only available on DVD right now
- Irma Vep (HBO tv miniseries; 2022), Olivier Assayas
And we have posted a “crib sheet” to all the named personalities in Linklater’s film (much thanks to Netflix for the basic information).
Film Details
Original title / Titre originale: Nouvelle Vague (2025)
Running time / Durée: 1h46m
Genres: Comedy, Drama, History
Directed by / Réalisé par: Richard Linklater
Casting: Guillaume Marbeck, Zoey Deutch, Aubry Dullin, Adrien Rouyard, Antoine Besson
Stream it online / Regarder sur: Netflix, Netflix Standard with Ads
Ceci est l’histoire de Godard tournant « À bout de souffle », racontée dans le style et l’esprit de Godard tournant « À bout de souffle ».
After writing for Cahiers du cinéma, a young Jean-Luc Godard decides making films is the best film criticism. He convinces producer Georges de Beauregard to fund a low-budget feature, and creates a treatment with fellow New Wave filmmaker François Truffaut about a gangster couple. The result? Breathless, one of the first features of the Nouvelle Vague era of French cinema.