Netflix Buys Richard Linklater’s ‘Nouvelle Vague’ After Cannes Debut

Netflix has acquired Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague, a black-and-white love letter to the French New Wave, particularly to the 1960 traditional Breathless.

The sale comes after the movie’s sturdy debut on the Cannes Film Festival, the place it acquired a 10-minute-plus standing ovation from the viewers. “If you do it long enough, I always thought you can make one film about making films. This is mine,” the filmmaker stated on the Cannes press convention 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 legal on the run after killing a policeman, and his romantic entanglement with Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg), an American journalism scholar in Paris. Linklater’s French-language film is shot on movie within the 4:3 side ratio and stars Guillaume Marbeck as Godard, Zoey Deutch as Godard’s star Jean Seberg and Aubry Dullin as Jean-Paul Belmondo. 

THR movie critic Jordan Mintzer wrote in his evaluation, “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 government editor of awards, additionally predicts that Nouvelle Vague is among the strongest titles popping out of Cannes within the Oscar dialog. Linklater has beforehand been nominated for 5 Academy Awards.

Nouvelle Vague will probably not obtain an extended theatrical run within the U.S., simply the usual awards-qualifying two-week window domestically, a supply tells THR.

Deadline was first to report the information of the sale.