Nouvelle Vague (2025), directed by Richard Linklater, is a movie about a movie. It reenacts the making of Jean-Luc Godard's landmark 1960 film, Breathless (French: À bout de souffle, meaning 'out of breath').
Frank Cicurel plays Raymond Cauchetier, who was set photographer for Breathless and many other French New Wave films. You can see some of Cauchetier's original photos here, shot with a Rolleiflex twin lens reflex (TLR) camera.
As this Guardian interview relates:
Later when Henri Cartier-Bresson suggested he work for Magnum, [Cauchetier] refused to buy the required Leica, sticking with his trusty Rollieflex [sic] that had so often survived being dropped in the Mekong river, thus forfeiting his chance to work for the agency.
Linklater's movie is obsessively attentive to period detail, and of course, Cauchetier is shown using a Rolleiflex.
The still below – and all others in this post – are from Nouvelle Vague.
We then see the scene he is photographing:
...and also the image through the Rolleiflex's waist-level finder.
But wait! A TLR finder is laterally inverted, and this image is not. Aubry Dullin, playing lead actor Jean-Paul Belmondo, is on the left – both in the actual scene and in the finder.
Funnily enough, the error is not repeated in a subsequent scene.
Here, Belmondo, in the white shirt, is on the right in the scene:
...and on the left in the finder, as it should be.
I'm guessing the TLR finder image was composited in post, but I have no explanation for why it would be correctly oriented in one scene but not in the other. Maybe they left it in just so that pedants like me would discover it and feel smug.
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