Guillaume Marbeck, pure Godard
Guillaume Marbeck plays Jean-Luc Godard in Richard Linklater’s new film Nouvelle Vague, a kind of obsessively accurate making-of of À bout de souffle (1960). Blending an undramatic reflection on the past, timeless musings on authorship and cinematic genius, and a hangout movie spread across the Haussmann boulevards, Linklater’s film circles around one of cinephilia’s founding myths (sacred monsters, neighborhood cinemas, film stock, “all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun,” etc.), probing how much of that mythology still “holds” in an era shaped by a radically different image culture. Alongside Zoey Deutch (as Jean Seberg) and Aubry Dullin (as Jean-Paul Belmondo), Guillaume Marbeck – a newcomer appearing out of nowhere – approaches the Godard monument without hubris, portraying him as a mercurial, spirited presence bluffing his way through youth. We spoke with Marbeck over Zoom about this first experience in the film industry and about the “heavy legacy” of the incomparable JLG, filtered through Linklater’s relaxed, all-American sensibility.
Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. He studied film theory in Grenoble, Paris, Dublin.
