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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