Netflix has acquired Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague, a black-and-white love letter to the French New Wave, specifically to the 1960 classic Breathless.
The sale comes after the film’s strong debut at the Cannes Film Festival, where it received a 10-minute-plus standing ovation from the audience. “If you do it long enough, I always thought you can make one film about making films. This is mine,” the filmmaker said at the Cannes press conference for Nouvelle Vague.
Nouvelle Vague tells the story of the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, which follows Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a small-time criminal on the run after killing a policeman, and his romantic entanglement with Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg), an American journalism student in Paris. Linklater’s French-language movie is shot on film in the 4:3 aspect ratio and stars Guillaume Marbeck as Godard, Zoey Deutch as Godard’s star Jean Seberg and Aubry Dullin as Jean-Paul Belmondo.
THR film critic Jordan Mintzer wrote in his review, “It’s an impressive package that certainly required more money and manpower than Godard’s first feature did, while ironically enough, the moral of this movie is that a big budget and crew aren’t needed to make something great. Linklater celebrates JLG’s audacity even if he’s directed something more conventional (although much to his credit, he directed it almost entirely in French). If Nouvelle Vague is not exactly Breathless, it’s a loving homage to the crazy way Breathless was made — back when you could shoot movies fast, cheap and out of control, and somehow change cinema in the process.”
Scott Feinberg, THR‘s executive editor of awards, also predicts that Nouvelle Vague is one of the strongest titles coming out of Cannes in the Oscar conversation. Linklater has previously been nominated for five Academy Awards.
Nouvelle Vague will likely not receive a longer theatrical run in the U.S., just the standard awards-qualifying two-week window domestically, a source tells THR.
Deadline was first to report the news of the sale.