New Delhi, May 23 -- "Reality is not continuity!" exclaims Jean-Luc Godard during the making of À Bout de Souffle, as a script supervisor attempts to remove a coffee cup that hadn't been there in the previous shot. Correction: exclaims the actor playing Godard in Nouvelle Vague, Richard Linklater's film about the making of the 1959 French New Wave classic. (As if all this wasn't meta enough, try watching it at the Cannes Film Festival in a theatre full of critics and filmmakers.)

It's a bold move to tell a story about the making of one of the most influential-and most studied-films in cinema history, particularly one whose place in the canon marks a disruption of all the filmmaking conventions that came before it. Add to that the no...