Richard Linklater’s latest film Nouvelle Vague is not so much a re-enactment of cinema history, but a celebratory tribute act – joyously reliving the spirit of the early French New Wave, as it re-imagines 1959 Paris and the chaotically innovative shooting of Jean-Luc Godard’s epoch-making Breathless (A Bout de Souffle). Most of the cast are newcomers, but there’s one familiar face: American actor Zoey Deutch. She plays Jean Seberg, already a Hollywood star when Godard cast her as expat student and newspaper vendor Patricia. Seberg’s stroll with Jean-Paul Belmondo on the Champs-Elysées, in T-shirt, slacks and ballet flats, is one of the legendary duets of French cinema.
Deutch has Seberg’s style down impeccably: her awkward American-accented French, her balletic bounce in that scene, her exuberant shout of “New York Herald Tribune!” On a Zoom call from Los Angeles, Deutch – Seberg’s blond gamine cut now grown out into symmetrical black bangs – admits that when Linklater first suggested she might play the role, she knew nothing about Seberg, or about Breathless. That was way back in 2014, when they were shooting Linklater’s college baseball comedy Everybody Wants Some!! “I was 19,” says Deutch, “and I know there are plenty of 19-year-olds who are cinephiles and know a ton about that world, but I didn’t.”
