Richard Anthony’s effortlessly cool song caught my ear over the closing titles of Nouvelle Vague in the cinema – a familiar tune with a new twist.

It’s a classic example of the chanson style known as “yé-yé” – a Frenchified rewrite of Leiber and Stoller’s song Three Cool Cats

The new lyrics, matching the title of Richard Linklater’s film about Jean-Luc Godard’s breakthrough New Wave movie Breathless, are by Armand Canfora and Richard Anthony.

Anthony, the singer, is apparently known there as “the father of the twist” for his francophone adaptations of pop hits in the ’60s and ’70s, though I think I can live without his versions of Lily The Pink (Lily La Rosada) or  In The Year 2525 (L’An 2525) and Hit The Road Jack (Fiche Le Camp, Jack).

This, on the other hand, is effortlessly cool, as is Richard Linklater’s love letter to Godard, Paris and the late ’50s, recreating the shoot for Breathless in the same glorious monochrome as the original.

Anthony (real name Ricardo Btesh) was born into a Syrian Jewish family in Cairo and grew up in Egypt and Argentina – and studied at Brighton College before settling in Paris in 1951.

By the early ’60s he was one of France’s biggest stars, with hits including a version of the Stones song Ruby Tuesday, retitled Fille Sauvage.

He even had a handful of English language hit singles, recorded at Abbey Road Studios, including If I Loved You from Carousel, before moving to LA in the ’70s.