How cool is that! Richard Linklater's homage to Jean-Luc Godard's 1960 masterpiece will leave you breathless

Nouvelle Vague (12A, 106 mins)

Verdict: Ineffably cool

Rating:

Richard Linklater, from where I’m sitting, is the most interesting movie director at work today. And one of the very best. I think Boyhood (2014) is the film of the century so far, and his credits also include the charmers Before Sunrise (1995) and the subsequent two films in the trilogy, not to mention the joyous comedy School Of Rock (2003) and the irresistible rom-com Hit Man (2023). 

Then there’s the epic musical he’s working on, Merrily We Roll Along, which is not due to wrap for another 15 years.

Nor does Linklater shy from making pictures which indulge his own fascination in aspects of show-business. Indeed, two of them have arrived in quick succession this year.

First there was Blue Moon, his compellingly melancholic, deliberately theatrical account of a night in the life of the lyricist Lorenz Hart.

Now there is Nouvelle Vague, the delightful French-language, black-and-white chronicle of the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s wonderful 1960 film A Bout de Souffle, or Breathless.

Godard was perhaps the most influential of all French film-makers: a pioneer of the New Wave (Nouvelle Vague) movement that changed the way movies were made.

Breathless, his debut feature, was also his masterpiece. To fully appreciate Nouvelle Vague it certainly helps to have seen Breathless and better still, to love it, but it’s not essential.

Linklater sets the scene and tells the story with so much joy that it will reel you in, whether or not you are familiar with Godard’s work.

Breathless stars newcomer Jean-Paul Belmondo (played by Aubry Dullin) as Michel, a petty criminal, with the more experienced Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch) as his American girlfriend, Patricia.

Michel, just like Godard himself (Guillaume Marbeck), is a fan of American film noir. But he takes his obsession with Humphrey Bogart too far, and after killing a traffic cop is forced to go on the run.

Godard, not yet 30, has only 20 days to make this film, and is constantly at loggerheads with the producer, even to the point of a public scuffle.

To accommodate the tight budget he hides his camera in a postman’s trolley, so that he doesn’t have to pay extras. And on the first day of filming he wraps after just two hours, admitting he’s run out of ideas.

At one point Seberg asks him if he’s making it all up as he goes along. To a worrying extent, he is.

I saw Nouvelle Vague at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, where it was rapturously received. If the mostly French audience thought it impertinent that an American had made it, they didn’t say so.

It’s not a perfect film: Dullin might look like Belmondo but lacks his fizzing charisma.

But it is an ineffably cool film, ingeniously told in the style of Breathless, and I really couldn’t have enjoyed it more.

Nouvelle Vague is in select cinemas now.

 ALSO SHOWING...

Kangaroo (PG, 107 mins)

Verdict: Bouncy and bittersweet

Rating:

Kangaroo highlights the unpredictability of the animal world. But unlike Primate (18), another of this week's big releases, which is a cautionary (and extremely gory) horror story about the consequences of keeping a chimp as a pet, it does so in the context of a family film.  

Kangaroo is an engaging, bittersweet and indeed bouncy tale of an over-ambitious Sydney weatherman (Ryan Corr) who is publicly disgraced after an unfortunate incident with a dolphin. 

Happily, he finds redemption in the Outback, when he befriends a spirited girl (Lily Whiteley) and embraces her passion for nurturing baby kangaroos. 

Kangaroo is in major cinemas now.