When I first heard that “Nouvelle Vague,” Richard Linklater’s ingenious and elating docudrama about the making of “Breathless,” had been sold to Netflix, I initially had the reaction I think a lot of people did. I thought: Jean-Luc Godard must be turning over in his grave. For “Nouvelle Vague” isn’t just another movie about the making of a movie. It’s about the making of a movie that incarnates the word cinema.
In 1959, when it was shot and edited, and 1960, when it was released, “Breathless” revolutionized the very meaning of what cinema could be. The film became an art-house hit — just about the only one Godard would ever have — and the magic of it, the poetry and excitement, is that its lyrically brash streets-of-Paris-in-black-and-white image of a gangster movie that looked and felt like a documentary was both life-size and larger-than-life. A generation of moviegoers, and moviemakers, saw “Breathless,” and it changed what movies were, opening the door to the transcendent realism of the New Hollywood, which we might think of as the grand third phase of cinema. (The first phase was silent film; the second was the Hollywood studio system of the sound era.)
Given all that, the idea that Linklater’s love letter to “Breathless” would only be seen on the small screen seemed the ultimate film-distribution irony, if not blasphemy. If “Nouvelle Vague” isn’t destined to be experienced in a movie theater, then what independent film is? (Yes, the movie will receive a two-week Oscar-qualifying run, meaning that it will play in a couple of theaters in New York and L.A. But 99 percent of the people who see “Nouvelle Vague” will watch it at home.)
And yet…moments after I first had that thought, I had a second thought. I began to ponder, a bit more deeply, what Jean-Luc Godard would actually make of the fact that this incandescent homage to his groundbreaking first feature, and to the living spirit of the French New Wave, would be watched almost exclusively on television. And it struck me that he’d probably be fine with it, and would probably laugh off the whole issue as having nothing whatsoever to do with the fate of cinema.
I thought about what Godard, if he were still around (he died, by assisted suicide, in 2022, at the age of 91), might say about Netflix, and I imagined that in his playful gnomic trolling aphoristic way he’d say something like, “People think that there is Netflix, and that there are movie theaters. But today, you are never watching Netflix more than when you’re in a movie theater.”
To Jean-Luc Godard, “cinema” didn’t just mean watching a movie on the big screen. It meant something spiritual: a transportation into the sacred reality of what the big screen could hold. Godard, in his prickly meditative high-mindedness, spent years dabbling in video (in many ways a small-screen medium), and he might not have even approved of “Nouvelle Vague.” He might have said, “‘Breathless’ was cinema. ‘Nouvelle Vague’ is a museum. Therefore, ‘Breathless’ is now something you see in a museum.”
At the recent Cannes Film Festival, where “Nouvelle Vague” premiered to an enraptured response, I got into a number of speculative chats with people about how the film would perform once it was out in the real world. There was much conversation about what distribution company would be right for it, and which one would actually buy it. Netflix figured into those discussions: It had picked up Linklater’s previous film, “Hit Man” (at the Venice Film Festival in 2023, where the company paid a cool $20 million for it). But it’s my feeling that “Hit Man,” while it may have performed well for Netflix, did not achieve the kind of buzzy profile that it would have had in movie theaters, and it’s therefore my suspicion (or maybe just my projection) that Linklater couldn’t have been too happy about that. I figured he gave his blessing to the “Hit Man”/Netflx deal as a kind of experiment, and it didn’t seem likely that he would want to repeat it, especially with a cinematic flower as delicate as “Nouvelle Vague.”
What everyone seemed to agree on is that even with a powerful distributor like Neon or A24, “Nouvelle Vague” was never going to be an independent film that broke the bank. What independent film does these days? “The Brutalist” crawled to $16 million, and “Anora,” with five big Oscars, was able to inch across the $20 million line. The audience for “Nouvelle Vague” — for a movie about how a small group of French film fanatics changed cinema 65 years ago — was always going to be small. My guess is that with proper handling, “Nouvelle Vague” could have made $3 to $5 million in theaters. So why does it matter if the film plays on Netflix instead?
“Nouvelle Vague” was shot in Paris and counts as a foreign-language film (90 percent of the movie is in French). It could wind up as France’s Academy Awards submission for best international film, and that’s likely to be the Oscar nomination it will be most eagerly gunning for, along with Zoey Deutch’s radiant performance as Jean Seberg for best actress. In the past, Netflix has excelled in the best international film category — it won the award for “Roma” (in 2019) and “All Quiet on the Western Front” (in 2023), and it got nominations for films like “The Hand of God,” “Society of the Snow,” and “Emilia Pérez.” So that’s one solid reason, at least, for “Nouvelle Vague” to go with Netflix.
Yet with all that considered, I’m haunted by the practical and aesthetic question of why Richard Linklater and his backers — for it’s not as if these decisions are ultimately made by the director — decided that Netflix would be the best home for “Nouvelle Vague.” With the visibility of advertising radically splintered and diminished in the digital age, the best way to sell a movie today is to turn it into an Event. Tom Cruise understands this, and so did the people who sold “The Brutalist” (It’s VistaVision! It’s a masterpiece! It’s Adrien Brody’s greatest performance since his last great performance!).
On a small and refined scale, I think “Nouvelle Vague” had the potential to be an Event for films fanatics. Have younger moviegoers even seen “Breathless”? In most cases, no. But I could envision them catching the fever by seeing “Nouvelle Vague” and then wanting to see “Breathless.” The Linklater name means a great deal. He is now one of the giants, one of the timeless ones. “Nouvelle Vague” is Linklater’s most celebrated film since “Boyhood” (2014), and I think the acclaim would have propelled people to see it. The media hook for this perfect storm of cinemania — great director makes a great movie about a great director making his first great movie, which helped launch perhaps the greatest era in movies — is irresistible.
It still will be, but I don’t think the coverage of “Nouvelle Vague” will now be as intense as it would have been. Because part of that perfect storm needed to be: And people are lining up to see it. That’s how movies work. “It came in at #3 on the Netflix Top 10” doesn’t have the same ring. When “Breathless” came out, we weren’t living in a world where people said things like, “It should really be seen on the big screen.” They didn’t have to say it. Back then, going to the movies meant…going to the movies. (It meant getting out of the house, something folks in 2025 should really be doing more of.) “Nouvelle Vague” might be described as a movie that raises nostalgia to the level of art. But when people see it now, on Netflix (assuming they even bother), the nostalgia will be, among other things, for an age when movies were bigger than we were.
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