General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Nouvelle Vague (1990 film)

Nouvelle Vague (French for "New Wave") is a 1990 drama film written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard, a French-Swiss co-production starring Alain Delon and Domiziana Giordano that competed at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival.¹ Its title points back to the French New Wave movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s with which Godard (1930-2022) was identified, and its story is built on a doubling: a woman saves a man from drowning, later lets him drown, and is then saved by a man who may be the same man.²

Key fact	Detail
Director and writer	Jean-Luc Godard, who also wrote the scenario and dialogues and edited the film¹
Year and countries	1990; France and Switzerland¹
Cannes	Shown in Competition at the 1990 Festival de Cannes¹
Runtime and format	89 minutes (listed as 90 min by Gaumont), color, 35 mm, French language³^•⁴
Principal cast	Alain Delon (the man, Roger Lennox and Richard Lennox), Domiziana Giordano (Elena Torlato-Favrini), Roland Amstutz (the gardener), Laurence Côte, Jacques Dacqmine⁵^•⁶
Key crew	Cinematography William Lubtchansky; editing Godard; sets Anne-Marie Miéville; producers Alain Sarde and Ruth Waldburger (Sara Films, Vega Films)¹^•⁵^•³
French release	23 May 1990⁷

Spoilers

Story

Godard described the film in two movements. In the first, which he called the Old Testament, a human being (a man) is saved from the fall by another human being (a woman). In the second, the New Testament, a human being (the same woman) is saved from the fall by another man; but the woman discovers that this other man is the same as the first, so that the second is, again and always, the first. "It is therefore a revelation," his synopsis concludes, "and if the man spoke the mystery, the woman revealed the secret."¹

The narrative version runs: Elena Torlato-Favrini, a beautiful and wealthy Italian countess, runs over a man, Roger Lennox, with her car, rescues him, and installs him in her house on Lake Geneva (lac Léman). His apathy and introversion gradually affect Elena, who withdraws from running the businesses she has inherited. Growing weary of her companion, she takes him out in a boat, throws him into the water, and lets him drown. Resuming her life impassively, she then sees the return of a man physically identical to Roger; skeptical of his claim to be the dead man's brother, she nevertheless lets the disturbing double settle into her life.⁶ Delon plays both Roger and Richard Lennox.⁶

The Larousse film dictionary, drawing on Godard's own hermetic text about the film, notes that the story can be told in a hundred ways and asks whether the film is a poem; it records that the work was much debated on that point.²

Production and style

The film was produced by Sara Films and Vega Films, with Alain Sarde and Ruth Waldburger as producers.⁵^•³ Godard's longtime collaborators filled the key technical roles: William Lubtchansky was director of photography, Anne-Marie Miéville designed the sets, and Godard himself edited.¹

Quotation as method is central to the film's texture. Reporting from Cannes, the Los Angeles Times described gardeners, maids, and waitresses pacing plush lawns reciting lines from writers including Raymond Chandler, Dostoevsky, Hemingway, and Schiller. At a press conference Godard admitted he had to stretch a two-minute plot to the hour and a half needed for a feature, and said he had sifted through favorite authors to produce the necessary material: "All those picturesque, musical quotes don't belong to me, they belong to humanity."⁸

Delon and Godard

Alain Delon, then one of the most famous stars of French cinema, said in a later interview that Godard was the only auteur director he had ever worked with, and that he believed it was thanks to him that Godard was able to make the film.⁹ Delon had earlier told interviewers that the New Wave filmmakers had not wanted him when the movement emerged, though he later worked with Godard.¹⁰ According to Le Monde's obituary account, Sarde put Delon in touch with Godard, who had just directed Johnny Hallyday in Détective; the result was "beautiful and abstruse," and the film was selected for competition at Cannes.¹¹

Godard himself was ambivalent at the premiere. Asked at Cannes whether the director of Breathless had just produced his worst film, he acknowledged that at times so many people were involved in the project that he felt it no longer belonged to him, and that "at one stage I had the impression that this would be my first bad film."⁸

Reception and standing

Contemporary and later critical opinion has been divided. Vincent Canby of The New York Times gave the film 2 of 5 stars, calling it "a good title rather badly used" for Godard's "featherweight new film."¹² Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader took the opposite view, writing that Delon stars in "what may be the last truly great theatrical feature by Jean-Luc Godard to date," and Trevor Johnston in Time Out found that the film, Godard's opening salvo of the 1990s, "sustains an elegiac note to unexpectedly potent effect."¹² On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 71% Tomatometer from 7 reviews.¹²

The film has also been folded back into Godard's own project of cinema history: footage was edited into Histoire(s) du cinéma: Une vague nouvelle (1999).¹³ The title has since been reused: Richard Linklater's 2025 film Nouvelle Vague, about the making of Godard's Breathless (1960), premiered in Competition at Cannes 35 years after Godard's film of the same name.¹⁴

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026