Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague is a black-and-white, 35-mm., 1960 French movie made today with a digital camera by a Texan who doesn’t speak French.
He gives us the sooty, contrasty old Paris of cobblestoned streets and white skies where black-haired young men talk in quotes and the only blonde is a 20-year-old movie star from Iowa. I have no idea how he managed to crawl into Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless to reconstitute its dramatic scenes and its real-life context—the milieu of passionate cinephile, Cahiers du Cinéma film critics sweating with frustration at their typewriters because they’re not yet directing—but he did. He understood everything, and you will, too.
