“I have YES tattooed on my foot!” Zoey Deutch plays Jean Seberg in a joyful celebration of Godard’s classic Breathless film

RRichard Linklater’s latest film Nouvelle Vague is not a re-enactment of cinematic history, but a celebratory tribute – happily recapturing the spirit of the early French New Wave, reimagining 1959 Paris and the chaotically inventive filming of Jean-Luc Godard’s epoch-making Breathless (A Bout de Souffle). Most of the cast are newcomers, but there is one familiar face: American actor Zoey Deutch. She plays Jean Seberg, already a Hollywood star when Godard casts her as expatriate student and newspaper vendor Patricia. Seberg’s stroll with Jean-Paul Belmondo down the Champs-Élysées, in shirts, trousers and ballet flats, is one of the legendary duets of French cinema.

Deutch has understated Seberg’s style flawlessly: her awkward, American-accented French, her balletic bounce in that scene, her impulsive screams of “New York Herald Tribune!” On a Zoom call from Los Angeles, Deutch — who has now grown Seberg’s blond bob into symmetrical black bangs — admits that when Linklater first suggested she might play the role, she knew nothing about Seberg, or about Breathless. It was 2014, when they were filming Linklater’s college baseball comedy Everybody Wants Some!! “I was 19, and I know there are a lot of 19-year-olds who are movie fans and know a lot about this world, but I didn’t,” Deutsch says.

Nouvelle Vague in French: Deutsch spent two years learning the language, perfecting Seberg’s clear transatlantic delivery. But upon her first viewing of Breathless, Deutch admits she didn’t quite understand what was so extraordinary about the film, since its innovations—its improvisatory openness and staccato rhythms—had long since been absorbed into the language of mainstream cinema. “I was confused. I don’t think I understood what punk rock was like at the time.” She suggests that if anyone still doesn’t get it, they should watch Godard’s film alongside Linklater’s as a double bill: “You’ll realize how different and bold Breathless is when you watch it with ours.”

Iowa-born Seberg was discovered as a teenager and, despite her inexperience, went on to star twice for the notoriously demanding Otto Preminger. She played Joan of Arc in his 1957 film Saint Joan, in which Seberg said she was “burned at the stake by the press,” and then starred in Bonjour, Trieste, in which her witty energy impressed critics, including Godard’s comrade-in-arms François Truffaut.

Linklater’s film shows Seberg at a turning point: living in Paris, skeptical of Godard’s potential as a director, but eager for new possibilities. In a new mystery novel, Deutch’s Seberg may be baffled and exasperated by Godard’s unpredictability and dogmatic manner, but she gives it the best she can, which leads him to shrink mischievously, and often to his delight.

“She recognized his genius, and she was so grateful for this life-changing opportunity,” Deutsch says. But she said in later interviews that he really saw her more as an idea than a person. “He wasn’t interested in who I was, just what I could represent.” I think that’s something very profound — and certainly the experience of a lot of young women in this business.

Seberg’s post-Breathless career was busy but variable, most famously starring in the 1964 melodrama Lilith, as a mental hospital patient who becomes the object of obsessive desire of a staff member, played by Warren Beatty; and appearing with Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood in the 1969 musical Paint Your Wagon. She also made two feature films directed by her second husband, the French novelist Romain Gary, both of which starred her harshly, 1968’s Birds of Peru, making her the center of a garish mixture of European eroticism.

Her later life was depicted in the 2019 biographical film Seberg, starring Kristen Stewart. When she died at the age of 40 in Paris in 1979, it was presumed a suicide, following a brutal FBI harassment campaign in response to her support for the Black Panther Party. In a press conference afterward, Gary said that the FBI planted false rumors in the press that Seberg’s impregnation by a Mexican revolutionary named Carlos Navarra in 1970 was actually by the Black Panther.

Dutch studied much of this, although none of it directly fed into the Nouvelle Vague. “I always want to look at the big picture, but Rick,” she says [Linklater] He was very persistent in reminding us that we were photographing a moment in time. The director will say to Guillaume Marbeek, who plays Godard: “You’re not an icon yet – these people are just young, ambitious, eccentric artists doing whatever they want. They’re not what we know them now.”

When Deutch worked with Linklater on Everybody Wants Some!!, she had the only significant female role in (unusually for the director) an aggressively masculine film about college baseball players raising hell and “chasing chicks” in early 1980s Texas. “I think he got the feeling that, at 19, I would be able to hold my own against all these macho men – as if no one would push me.”

As a Hollywood insider since birth, you can imagine that Deutch won’t have it easy. Her father, Howard Deutch, directed the beloved film Pretty in Pink; Her mother is Lea Thompson, who played Lauren in the Back to the Future trilogy. Thompson was also in Howard the Duck, an infamous flop based on the Marvel Comics character, a cigar-chomping waterbird and sage from another planet. When I joke that perhaps there was a family ban on bringing it up at the table, Dutch plays off the scandal: “Absolutely not! There’s just Pure embrace Howard the Duck.”

She remembers being very protective of her mother. “You have to imagine that you’re a little kid and there are strangers who come up to you, thinking they know her and say really inappropriate things, and they have no boundaries. And then there are also really cool people who are just big fans and appreciate her work — but as a kid, you can’t separate the two.” She continued to support her mother, including on a professional level: in 2017, she and her older sister Madeleine co-starred with their mother in Thompson’s first film, The Year of Spectacular Men. A comedy-drama about a young woman navigating post-college, written by Madeleine and produced by Zoe.

There is a brief interruption – a scratch at the door and: “Mabel, stop! Mabel!” Mabel, who is out of the picture and unheard, is Dutch’s dog. “Mabel is the star of my life,” Deutsch says. Or at least one of them: Last September, she announced her engagement to comedian and YouTuber Jimmy Tatro.

Deutch, now 31, has had no shortage of roles since her debut, at age 15, in the Disney cruise ship children’s sitcom The Suite Life on Deck, though only a few have so far caused major ripples. She had established herself as one of the stars of romantic comedies, and increasingly combined harder roles: notably in the gangster drama The Outfit, with Mark Rylance, and in Clint Eastwood’s courtroom thriller, Juror No. 2. She also made her Broadway debut in Thornton Wilder’s 1938 classic Our Town, and The New York Times praised the “apple-cheeked, wild-spirited” Emily. “I loved this play so much that it stayed on my nightstand my whole life,” she says. “There are certain scripts in our lives that all influence us. This was one of them.”

Then there was one of her more difficult films, last year’s “Anniversary,” with Polish director Jan Komasa. Given her utter indifference in Nouvelle Vague, Deutch’s violent breakdown scene here comes as a major shock. Anniversary is a bleak dystopian story about the rise of a new, authoritarian America. In fact, Deutch spoke out this week at Sundance, where she premiered a new comedy, against the brutality of ICE and expressed her solidarity with the people of Minnesota: “I feel very proud to be an American, when I see the way communities and people are coming together during this time. But at the same time, I feel very ashamed to be an American, and to see how our government is handling things.”

Nouvelle Vague has every possibility to push Deutsch into the spotlight once and for all. Seberg, who played Joan of Arc at 18, may not have been ready for fame, but Deutch has been acting since she was 5, when she began acting lessons. She says she was encouraged rather than pushed, but admits it was her mother’s idea to enroll her in the Child Improvement program.

“At an early age, I learned that if you say ‘no’ to adults, they have to explain things to you,” Deutsch says. “So saying ‘no’ gave me more communication and a greater opportunity to be treated like an adult. Then my mother said, ‘What’s the opposite of no?’ Yes – Yes and!So it put me in improv mode and completely changed my life. “I actually got ‘Yes’ tattooed on my foot, so I can look down and say ‘Yes’ to the world.”

As an illustration, Dutch drags her foot into the zoom frame to view it. After Nouvelle Vague, maybe it’s time to tattoo the other person with a bold “Oui.”