Cynicism and Cigarettes

Nouvelle Vague—Richard Linklater’s new movie about the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s landmark debut feature À Bout de Souffle (Breathless)—is a sheer delight. I’ve seen Breathless four times over the years, and I devoted much of 2024 to writing a mammoth two-part retrospective of Godard’s relentless career and artistic suicide over the 62 years that elapsed between his 1960 breakthrough and his death (by actual suicide of the assisted kind) in 2022 at the age of 91.