Godard after Instagram

Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague, or How Netflix and Instagram Swallowed the Revolution

It is never easy to confront a legend. But it is even harder not to smother it with tenderness. Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague is a film that does to Jean-Luc Godard exactly what Netflix and Instagram do to everything they touch: it smooths, warms, aestheticizes—and hands it back to the mass audience as a pop-cultural puree masquerading as art. This is Godard after pasteurization. Godard without bacteria. Godard who no longer bites.

This film is Godard framed by an algorithm. It can be binge-watched. It can be loved. It can be “appreciated” without risking anything at all. And therein lies its original sin.

Richard Linklater—the eternal boy of American independent cinema, author of Slacker, Before Sunrise, Boyhood—returns in 2025 to his first great love: the French New Wave. But he returns not as a revolutionary, rather as a conservator of cultural heritage. Nouvelle Vague reconstructs the making of À bout de souffle: Paris, 1959; a young Godard; Belmondo; Seberg; jazz; handheld cameras; the chaos of the set; the mythology of Cahiers du cinéma. Everything checks out. Everything is in place. And everything is dead.

The film resembles an Instagram Reel about the New Wave: a black-and-white filter, cigarettes as props, improvisation as style, rebellion as decoration. Linklater is not making a film about revolution—he is producing content about revolution. The difference is decisive.

In 1960, Godard was not “paying homage” to cinema. He was attacking it. À bout de souffle was an act of sabotage against narrative, editing, illusion itself. The jump cut was not an aesthetic flourish; it was an act of aggression toward the viewer. The handheld camera was not a “vibe,” but a necessity born of poverty and urgency. Improvisation was not charming—it was the risk of collapse. The film could have fallen apart. And that is precisely why it was alive.

Linklater removes one word from this story: risk.

His Nouvelle Vague is perfectly safe. Every chaos is “beautiful.” Every improvisation is delightful. Every conflict is endearing. Guillaume Marbeck plays Godard as an eccentric, lovable nerd; Zoey Deutch’s Seberg is soft, accessible, pleasant. This is Godard filtered through focus groups. Godard made likable without effort.

But Godard was unbearable. Arrogant. Misanthropic. Destructive. An enemy of the viewer’s comfort. Linklater transforms him into the hero of a feel-good biopic. This is not a reconstruction of a revolution—it is its museification.

And here Michel Onfray enters, dressed not in white but in the black of decadence. For years, Onfray has repeated a single thought: the West does not perish in flames—it drowns in a sweet nostalgia for its own rebellion. Revolutions today are not suppressed; they are consumed. Rebellion is no longer censored; it is aestheticized. And this is exactly what Nouvelle Vague does.

The film is an example of cultural necrophilia. We no longer kill the fathers—we embalm them. Godard becomes an object of contemplation, not a threat. His gestures are severed from their consequences. Politics, fury, nihilism—all vanish. What remains is style. A vibe. Black-and-white nostalgia.

It is the same mechanism Onfray mocked in the American appropriation of French Theory. Derrida, Foucault, Barthes—all crossed the Atlantic only to be turned into academic mush: without edge, without danger, without the capacity to disrupt institutions. Deconstruction became a method for writing essays, not for destroying structures. Foucault was reduced to a tool of campus moralism. Revolt became a syllabus.

Godard follows the same trajectory. America takes the French cinematic rebellion, grinds it through the machinery of indie cinema, adds warmth, empathy, and a “human touch,” and returns to Europe a premium product: revolution without revolution.

Most embarrassing of all, Linklater never even asks what remains of that rebellion today. Nouvelle Vague ends with the triumph of À bout de souffle. We know the film succeeded. We know it changed cinema. There is no tension, no question of failure, of cost, of aftermath. Yet Godard’s real story begins after success: political suicide, Marxism, propaganda, the deliberate exit from the market.

That Godard is unwanted. Because that Godard would be unsellable. Unprogrammable for Netflix. Impossible to consume as a “love letter.”

Nouvelle Vague is therefore a deeply American film—not because it was made in the United States (shots in France), but because it cannot tolerate real negation. American auteur cinema loves rebellion, as long as it is charming, aesthetic, and safely retrospective. Contemporary rebellion is always a problem.

Linklater makes a film about Godard at precisely the moment when cinema is no longer capable of a Godardian gesture. And instead of exposing that impotence, he covers it with nostalgia. Instead of asking why there is no New Wave today, he tells us how wonderful it was when it existed.

This is decadence in Onfray’s sense: cinema that celebrates its own ruins without the courage to destroy anything new. Cinema that simulates radicalism using filters palatable to the mass audience. Cinema radical only in the past tense.

Nouvelle Vague is Godard after Instagram. A rebellion you can scroll. A revolution that does not dirty your hands. A film that says, “Look how brave we once were,” instead of asking, “Why are we no longer brave?”

And in that sense, it is perfectly accurate. Accurate like the diagnosis of a disease.

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On the First Cancellation of Louis de Funès

 A woman hijacked an airplane because she did not want a film starring Louis de Funès to be released in theaters. She demanded neither money nor freedom. She wanted the premiere of The Mad Adventures of Rabbi Jacob cancelled. More than fifty years later, the story sounds like an anecdote. And yet it tells us far more about ourselves than we would like to admit.

Today, The Mad Adventures of Rabbi Jacob is associated with harmless, good-natured entertainment. It is a holiday film, endlessly replayed, memorized by heart, no longer functioning as a work of art but as part of the cultural landscape. Louis de Funès performing a Hasidic dance has become something like a French rite of passage: it makes children laugh, reassures adults, offends no one. Family cinema in its purest form.

The plot is simple—almost primitive—and that is precisely its strength. A wealthy French businessman, the embodiment of petty-bourgeois fears and prejudices, a man who dislikes Jews and Arabs with equal fervor, is accidentally drawn into a scheme involving Arab émigré activists. He flees them, but—as in any farce—disguised as a rabbi. The mechanism is as old as comedy itself: the mask, the misunderstanding, the exchange of roles, the carnivalesque inversion of order. The world is turned upside down so that, in the end, it may return to its place, slightly cleansed.

This unsophisticated yet charming comedy was conceived by its director, Gérard Oury, as a way of combating racial stereotypes. Oury was no revolutionary. He was rather a child of old-school French republicanism, which believed that society could be corrected gently—through laughter, irony, a touch of embarrassment. In interviews, he repeatedly insisted that he had no interest in cinema of accusation; comedy, he argued, should “disarm hatred,” not inflame it. France—even when laughing at itself—was meant to remain a country that ultimately chose cohesion over disintegration.

This attitude was characteristic of French comedy at the time. Do not stain the Republic’s good name, but suggest a correction. Mock human flaws, yet continue to like humanity. Ridicule the racist without dragging him before a tribunal. Expose him to laughter so that he—and the audience with him—might laugh at himself. Comedy as a form of gentle pedagogy.

And yet this mechanism, which today appears harmless, was anything but innocuous at the moment of the film’s release. Not everyone received Oury’s work as a cheerful manifesto of tolerance. The Mad Adventures of Rabbi Jacob had its resolute opponents, particularly within left-wing critical circles. The accusation was that, rather than dismantling stereotypes, the film merely reproduced and reorganized them—especially in its portrayal of Arabs, depicted either as grotesque conspirators or as exotic embodiments of political chaos.

The context could hardly have been more volatile. The film’s premiere coincided with the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War. The Middle East was in flames, Europe was emotionally charged, and the French left was experiencing yet another phase of infatuation with the Palestinian cause—often more symbolic than concrete. In such a climate, a comedy that made jokes about rabbis, Arabs, and the French bourgeois all at once ceased to be an innocent farce. It became a political gesture, whether its director wished it or not.

Among the protesters was a woman whose name today means very little: Danielle Cravenne. She was the wife of the man who created the César Awards, a pillar of the French film world—of the very establishment to which Oury’s film belonged. Cravenne was so deeply shaken by the affair that she decided to perform an absolute gesture. Armed with a rifle, she hijacked an airplane, demanding that the release of The Mad Adventures of Rabbi Jacob be cancelled until the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was resolved.

The sentence sounds today like an absurdity, or a grim joke. And yet it truly happened. It is at this point that the innocence of our contemporary nostalgia ends—and another story begins, one that forces us to ask what kind of cinema this really was, the cinema we still laugh at so carelessly.

On October 18, 1973, Danielle Cravenne boarded an Air France flight from Paris to Nice. She was elegant, composed, accompanied by her small dog. In her handbag: a weapon. She did not behave like a terrorist, but like someone who had made an irrevocable decision. Shortly after takeoff, she informed the crew that she was taking control of the aircraft. Her demands were at once disturbingly precise and utterly unrealistic: the immediate suspension of the film’s release, the sealing of all copies, and a public commitment by the French authorities to work toward ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The plane landed in Marseille under the pretext of refueling before a supposed flight to Cairo. Cravenne repeated that she did not want to hurt anyone. She allowed all passengers and most of the crew to disembark, keeping only the pilot and the chief steward on board. She asked for a meal. She waited. The authorities opted for force. Police officers disguised as stewards boarded the plane; one of them was an elite sniper. Moments later, Danielle Cravenne was shot twice and killed.

She was thirty-five years old. She had two young children. The film was released as planned and became an enormous success. The story of the woman who tried to stop it was almost immediately erased from collective memory.

It would likely have remained forgotten altogether, had Jean-Philippe Daguerre not returned to it years later—first in the form of a novel, The Woman Who Didn’t Like Rabbi Jacob, and now as a stage production he both wrote and directed. His gesture is neither an act of rehabilitation nor of accusation. It is, rather, an attempt to recover a figure reduced first to a headline, then to a footnote.

The form of the play is strikingly restrained. Daguerre abandons realistic sets in favor of a near-cinematic staging: video images, archival footage, multiplied screens that construct a space of memory rather than reconstruction. It is a theater that does not masquerade as documentary, yet does not retreat into metaphor. A chronological narrative leads the audience through the intimate life of the Cravennes while simultaneously depicting the birth of a film destined to become a massive success—and a catastrophe for a single individual.

For me, this story says a great deal—but not about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That conflict has become so terrifying today, so saturated with spirals of vengeance and moral absolutism, that it nearly defies speech. And that is precisely why I do not write about it here. What truly frightens me is something else: the fact that Danielle Cravenne never saw the film whose release she opposed so fiercely that she was willing to hijack an airplane. This seemingly secondary detail is, in truth, decisive. It reveals a pure, almost primal gesture: condemnation without knowledge, judgment without contact with the work itself, an act of moral violence grounded in imagination rather than experience.

In this sense, we are witnessing what might today be called an embryonic form of cancel culture—long before the term existed, long before social media and rituals of collective outrage. The mechanism is deeper than that. It is the belief that moral intention absolves one from the obligation to understand, that the righteousness of a cause excuses blindness, that emotional indignation is a sufficient warrant for action. José Ortega y Gasset perceived this phenomenon with unsettling clarity. He described it as the triumph of the mass man: one who no longer feels the need to confront reality, because his inner certainty suffices. A man who does not seek to know the world, but to nullify it whenever it fails to conform to his moral tension.

Cravenne did not fight the film as a work of art. She fought its symbol—what she believed it represented. The distinction is essential. And it is precisely within this gap that the danger lies: the moment when culture ceases to be a space of dispute and interpretation and becomes a field of execution—sometimes quite literally. Malice is not required. Absolute certainty is enough. And that, as history teaches us, can be even more dangerous than cynicism.

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The Conservative Commissioner Maigret Sheds a Tear for the Lost Order

 

The Conservative Commissioner Maigret Sheds a Tear for the Lost Order

Maigret and the Saint-Fiacre Case, which I recommend watching in its classic adaptation starring Jean Gabin, is a masterful crime film—a work that still defends the old order, yet leaves no illusions as to its fate. That order is dead.

Georges Simenon’s original novel, Maigret et l’affaire Saint-Fiacre (1932), is a striking example of his critique of modern society. Simenon writes from a position that is distinctly his own: that of a pessimist and a naturalist who believes neither in progress nor in the moral regeneration of the world.

Commissioner Maigret returns to his native village, where as a child he served as an altar boy and where his father worked as the estate manager for the local count. The places appear unchanged, yet the old world has vanished. The count is dead. Old Maigret is dead as well. Only the countess remains—and despite the difference in age, the young Maigret must once have felt something for her.

Any seasoned reader of classic detective fiction will quickly guess who will die. Yes—the countess. Murdered in an unusual way: by the announcement of her son’s supposed suicide.

Jean Gabin’s performance as Maigret is extraordinary. He embodies a man standing between two worlds: one who remembers measure, responsibility, and hierarchy, yet knows they cannot simply be restored.

This is essential viewing for any conservative reader or viewer who seeks not comfort, but truth.

A World Without Fathers

In Simenon’s Maigret and the Saint-Fiacre Case (1932), as well as in Jean Delannoy’s 1959 film adaptation starring Jean Gabin, Commissioner Jules Maigret appears as a defender of the paternal figure—a symbol of responsibility, proportion, and the old social order.

Through his investigation, Maigret safeguards the memory of deceased fathers: his own father, Évariste, a loyal estate steward, and the Count of Saint-Fiacre, patriarch of the domain. These figures of authority stand in sharp contrast to the decadence of the younger generation. Maurice, the spoiled heir, flees responsibility through gambling, while the Gautiers—greedy manipulators—seize power through financial fraud.

Within the framework of noir, Maigret resists the moral failures of a modern world that has abandoned its former ethical paradigm. Noir—a genre steeped in melancholy and moral ambiguity—casts the detective as a solitary guardian of ethics in a world stripped of rules. Simenon here criticizes interwar France, where economic crisis and bourgeois ascent erode traditional values of loyalty. Maigret, an empathetic observer, exposes these distortions while mourning the collapse of the fathers’ world—an order harmonious yet hierarchical, in which responsibility tempered chaos.

In the film with Gabin, this theme gains visual depth. The weary commissioner returns to Saint-Fiacre, and the ruined castle becomes a symbol of violated memory. The dinner of the suspects transforms into a confrontation with modern hypocrisy. Maigret, a noir archetype, defends the old paradigm and becomes the voice of conscience in the face of inevitable decline.

How, then, are we to live in a world where fathers are dead, replaced by hollow, irresponsible hedonists?

Death in the Church

(spoiler warning)

In both the novel and Delannoy’s film adaptation, the sacred context of the crime reveals the process of desacralization and the corruption of penitential symbolism. A psychological murder—committed through false information—gains depth by being embedded in a religious ritual.

In the novel, death occurs during Mass on All Souls’ Day, a time devoted to memory, reflection, and humility before death. An anonymous letter announces tragedy; a false note slipped into the countess’s missal, informing her of her son’s supposed suicide, triggers a fatal heart attack. The sacred setting intensifies the act of profanation: the victim’s piety—symbolic of the twilight of the aristocracy—turns against her, while the Gautiers escape any form of punishment.

In the film, the action is shifted to Ash Wednesday, strengthening the symbolism of penance and human vanity. Psychological manipulation profanes the ritual and exposes a modern evil that attacks not the body, but the soul. Maigret, a lucid and suffering witness, perceives a world irreparably corrupted—a world in which the sacred no longer consoles, but lays bare society’s moral fragility.

The old countess does not find healing in the church. She finds death. And it is she—not the criminal—who becomes the victim of the ritual. This gesture ultimately underscores the brutality of a world in which even holiness offers no protection from evil.

The Macabre Dinner

(full spoiler)

The gathering of suspects—the macabre dinner held almost beside the countess’s body—recalls the classic conventions of detective fiction, particularly those associated with Agatha Christie. In works such as Murder on the Orient Express or And Then There Were None, such scenes form the narrative climax: the detective reveals the truth, justice is restored, and harmony returns. Reason triumphs over chaos.

In Simenon, however, this motif takes a far darker turn. It is not a triumph of reason, but an indictment of modern decay. What is exposed is not merely the guilt of the Gautiers, but the disintegration of society as a whole: the moral dissolution of the aristocracy, the hypocrisy of the middle class, and the erosion of fundamental values.

The psychological crime, built on subtle manipulation, reveals the essence of modern evil. In interwar France, weakened by crisis, loyalty gives way to greed. Maigret remains an observer. He arrests no one. He does not close the case. The law proves powerless in the face of moral ambiguity, lending the scene a profoundly fatalistic tone.

This is a dinner after which nothing returns to normal.
And that is precisely why it is so terrifying.

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Maigret and His Feminine Side

 

Today I would like to recommend the film Maigret Sets a Trap (Maigret tend un piège, directed by Jean Delannoy, 1958, starring Jean Gabin).
It is here, in a brilliant adaptation of Simenon’s novel, that Jean Gabin reveals an original and remarkably deep story about a woman who is not a source of misfortune, but a subject in her own right — a dialogical voice for the male protagonist.

A Brief Summary of the Plot (with Spoilers)

The film takes place during a summer heatwave in Paris, primarily in the Montmartre district (Place du Tertre, the surroundings of Sacré-Cœur), with episodes in other parts of the city. Paris is suffocating, sweaty, tense — the heat acts as a catalyst for aggression and frustration, exactly as it does in Simenon’s fiction.

The city is terrorized by a serial killer who targets young women. The victims are stabbed, and their clothes are brutally torn apart — the violence has a clearly sexual and sadistic character, even though rape itself does not occur. The women share similar physical traits: small, rather plump, dark-haired. Depending on the source, four murders precede the beginning of the film, with another occurring during the investigation.

The police find themselves at a complete impasse: no witnesses, no robbery motive, no coherent clues. Under pressure from the press and public opinion, Maigret consults a psychiatrist, Professor Grosjean. He diagnoses the killer as a man with an enormous narcissistic ego, burdened by a deep inferiority complex toward women and driven by an obsessive need to dominate and demonstrate power. The key insight is that the killer will not stop until he feels threatened, exposed, or psychologically provoked — and that he is vain and highly sensitive to public humiliation.

Maigret therefore decides on a risky bluff. He arrests a petty criminal, Maurin (Marcel), and publicly announces that he is the murderer. Shortly afterward, Maurin is released but kept under close police surveillance. The goal is not to catch Maurin, but to provoke the real killer into either striking again or making a fatal mistake out of wounded vanity.

At the same time, Maigret investigates the circle of suspects, focusing on seemingly ordinary figures: craftsmen, petty bourgeois, artists. Inspector Lognon plays an important role (more prominent here than in the novel), as do figures of mothers and wives — family relations marked by toxic dependence, suppressed humiliation, and childhood trauma. Sexual tension, frustration, and rage hang over the city; Paris “chokes” in the heat just as Maigret chokes on his sense of helplessness.

The trap works — but not exactly as planned. The true perpetrator reveals himself through a series of dramatic events: a seemingly insignificant man, deeply wounded in his masculinity and trapped in a destructive family structure. The film introduces a significant shift in emphasis: a subplot in which Maurin’s wife kills to protect her husband. This twist strengthens the drama but simultaneously simplifies the psychological diagnosis known from the novel.

Three Women in the Trap: The Mother, the Accomplice, and the One Who Watches

In Maigret Sets a Trap, Simenon — perhaps more forcefully than anywhere else in the cycle — juxtaposes three female figures that together form a commentary on male violence, fantasies of femininity, and the limits of autonomy. Two of them become active participants in the drama of crime and punishment; the third remains outside the scene, yet it is her gaze that provides the story with its moral perspective.

The first is the mother — the classic Simenonian figure of la maman. In the novel (and even more clearly in Gabin’s film), the murderer’s mother is willing to do anything to protect her son. She not only remains silent and lies, but assumes the moral and emotional burden of guilt, and in the end even factual guilt. Her maternal love is absolute and unconditional — and at the same time destructive. By protecting her child, she becomes complicit in the continuation of the murders. Simenon does not portray her as a monster; instead, he shows how maternal sacrifice can become a trap for both sides — the son imprisoned by guilt toward his mother, the mother trapped in the belief that her sacrifice is the sole meaning of her existence.

The second woman is the wife — the figure of the “silent accomplice.” By agreeing to be not only a partner but also a shield for her husband, she assumes guilt so that he may continue to function in the world. In the novel, this role is especially clear in the figure of a woman who, knowing about the crimes, does not denounce her husband but remains silent and, at a crucial moment, tries to take the blame upon herself. Her stance is not heroism, but a form of self-destruction in the name of love — a love that demands she become a shield, an alibi, a shadow. Simenon does not glorify this posture; he exposes its tragic nature: a woman who relinquishes her subjectivity eventually ceases to exist as a distinct person.

And finally, the third woman — Mrs. Maigret. In The Trap, her role is minimal in terms of plot, yet structurally decisive. She appears in a few brief domestic scenes: making tea, handing her husband his slippers, listening as he returns exhausted; she does not interrogate, advise, or admire him. She is a witness and a commentator — not verbally, but through her presence. Her existence contrasts sharply with the two women from Montmartre: they die or lose themselves in the name of a man; she exists alongside Maigret, not for him. She does not mirror his expectations or become a projection of fantasy. She preserves an intact autonomy — quiet, unassuming, yet unquestionable.

Maigret’s Feminine Side

In her essay Maigret and Women: La maman and la putain (1978), Erica M. Eisinger formulated a thesis that has shaped most interpretations of women in Simenon for over forty years. According to her, the author divides female characters into two archetypes: the mother-caregiver (warm, domestic, asexual or sexually repressed) and the prostitute (passionate, destructive, most often a victim or the agent of her own downfall). Mrs. Maigret would be the pure maman; victims and suspects in most novels would be variations of the putain. This dichotomy, Eisinger argues, is deeply stereotypical and rooted in patriarchal imagination: a woman either serves (as a mother) or threatens and must be punished (as a prostitute).

But life does not always conform to feminist expectations.

Maigret Sets a Trap disrupts this scheme on two levels simultaneously. First, both the mother and the wife are implicated. Both function at once as maman figures and accomplices in crime; both are entangled in male sexual-sadistic violence. They cannot be neatly separated into archetypes — they are simultaneously victims and co-perpetrators. Second — and more importantly — Simenon condemns the male fantasy of woman as an object of projection. The killer murders women who, in his eyes, merge mother and prostitute into a single figure; he slashes them with a knife in an attempt to destroy an image he himself has created. The crimes are acts of desperate effort to break out of his own psychological trap — a trap in which a woman can be neither just a mother nor just a lover, but must be both at once, and therefore is never real.

In this context, Mrs. Maigret becomes the true heroine of the story. Not because she solves the mystery, but because she exists outside male imagination. A contemporary reader, shaped by feminist critique, may feel uneasy watching scenes in which she makes tea for her husband and remains silent. Yet Simenon does not portray her as a victim of patriarchy. Her silence is not submission; it is a choice. Her autonomy does not require loud declarations — it is realized in everyday life, in remaining herself even when her husband returns with yet another story of human misery and male destruction.

Unlike the mothers and wives of Montmartre, Mrs. Maigret does not sacrifice herself — she accompanies. She does not reflect Maigret’s expectations; she shares with him, as an equal, a space in which he can be himself: tired, empathetic, not always effective. It is precisely her intact personality — quiet, autonomous, non-fantasmatic — that becomes the final commentary on the entire story. In a world where men project their fears and desires onto women, and women die or lose themselves trying to fulfill those projections, Mrs. Maigret simply is. And this “being” proves to be the strongest form of resistance.

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