Following its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, the first trailer for Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague has now been released. The film’s title means New Wave in English, and it follows director Jean Luc-Godard as he directs his first feature film, Breathless. That film, which is often considered the beginning of the French New Wave, had an enormous impact on the history of movies more generally.
Guillaume Marbeck plays the film’s director, and Zoey Deutch stars as American actress Jean Seberg with Aubry Dullin as her French co-star Jean Paul-Belmondo. The teaser suggests that the film is shot in the same black-and-white style as the original Breathless, and features footage from the film along with French narration that describes what it is. “A pretty boy. A pretty girl. Paris 1959. A gym. A director. A camera. Film. A producer. An ingénue. Stars. Money. An American star. An American car,” the female narrator says.
This is not the first time that Linklater has gone back into the history of film to forage material for his own work. His 2008 film Me and Orson Welles had a similar premise, and followed a young man who gets a small role in the famous director’s 1937 stage production of Julius Caesar.
Nouvelle Vague reportedly got an 11-minute standing ovation following its Cannes premiere. While those ovations don’t always strictly correlate with the quality of a given movie, you’d rather have a long ovation than a short one. We won’t know for sure how good the movie actually is until it hits theaters in October 8.