Two Americas: Elegy or Revolt?

 In 2025, two films reached the screen that confront the American myth of identity in radically different ways. Both are competing for the Academy Awards this year. One is quiet, meditative, almost biblical in its restraint. The other is loud, chaotic, propelled by fury. Train Dreams by Clint Bentley and One Battle After Another by Paul Thomas Anderson have become, almost unintentionally, mirrors of two Americas: one that seeks to understand its roots, and one that longs to burn them.

Train Dreams tells the story of Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton), an ordinary logger and railroad laborer at the turn of the twentieth century in the forests of Idaho. Orphaned as a child, Grainier builds tracks and bridges, marries, starts a family, and then loses everything in a fire. He goes on living in a solitary cabin among the trees, grows old, encounters wolves and the ghosts of memory, and finally boards a small airplane to look down upon his life from above. This is not a film about grand events. It is a film about a single man who became part of the frontier myth—and was ultimately absorbed by it.

One Battle After Another, by contrast, follows a burned-out leftist radical (Leonardo DiCaprio), a former member of a fictional 1970s terrorist group who, after decades in hiding, returns to the fight against what he perceives as a fascist state. Flannel shirt, beard, latte in hand, paranoia, a daughter, and a permanent state of revolutionary readiness. PTA’s film is a volatile blend of black comedy, action, and psychedelia, in which aging Weather Underground–style militants square off against ICE, Christian nationalism, and “white supremacy.”

The difference between these two films is not merely aesthetic. It is ontological.

One Battle After Another attempts to transplant a distinctly European leftist posture—permanent revolution, hatred of “the system,” the romanticization of armed resistance—onto American soil. The result borders on the grotesque: a revolutionary styled as a hipster lumbersexual who despises his own nation, sneers at “ordinary Americans,” and wages war in the name of abstract ideals that, in practice, amount to contempt for the very myth that shaped his country. It is a film of detached elites importing European anti-fascist radicalism and forcing it into an American frame, ending in caricature: flannel, latte, and hostility toward the flag.

Train Dreams emerges from an entirely different source—a deep, rooted affection for America. Grainier is no revolutionary. He is myth embodied: the logger clearing forests, the railroad builder, the pioneer who believed in progress. Yet that same progress destroys him. The film does not accuse. It does not shout. It shows the cost—racism toward Chinese laborers, fire, loneliness, mortality—but it does so with respect and melancholy. This is not an attack on the frontier myth. It is its hermeneutics. An interpretation born of love.

And that is precisely why Train Dreams becomes a great epic.

It speaks for the millions of Grainiers upon whom American identity was built—men who wrestled with nature, constructed a nation with their hands, and were eventually left alone on the platform as the train of progress moved on. The film reveals the paradox of the myth: man is both master and victim—active in felling the forest, powerless before death, time, and nature. Grainier does not revolt. He does not hate. He endures. In that endurance—in the solitude of the woods, in the flight above his own life—he discovers something that can only be called the sacredness of ordinary existence. It is reconciliation with fate—not capitulation, but mature acceptance. American in its purest form: introspection rather than destruction.

One Battle After Another offers the opposite: perpetual revolt that curdles into self-loathing. European leftism, dressed in American costume, produces a grotesque revolutionary who despises the nation from which he sprang. This is not reflection on identity. It is war against it.

In the collision between these two ways of confronting national narrative, everything becomes clear. One film looks at America with love and melancholy—even as it reveals its brutality and the fragility of its myths. The other looks with contempt and seeks rupture. One builds continuity: this was our life, and it was worth living. The other demands rupture: it was all a lie—burn it down.

Train Dreams prevails because it is truer. Not because it is apolitical, but because it is deeply American. It does not need to shout. The soft whistle of a train in the forest is enough—and a man who, at last, feels connected to everything.

This is a great story. Not about revolution. About endurance.

Margot ROUSSEAU

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César 2026: Things More Important Than Books

 Everyone assumed that this year’s César for Best Film would go to Nouvelle Vague by Richard Linklater. The French are, after all, proud that Americans still live inside the legend of Godard. Despite a record number of nominations, Nouvelle Vague was duly honored — including the César for Best Director — yet the main prize went elsewhere. To a film that neither celebrates French exceptionalism nor takes a stand in the loud controversies tearing France apart today.

The award went to L’Attachement by Carine Tardieu. The great intellectuals did not debate this film. Even the public did not turn it into the event of the season: it was well received in cinemas, but it was no blockbuster. What, then, is this film about — the one the industry itself declared the most important, more important even than a reconstruction of Godard?

A child more important than books.

Sandra stands in the doorway of her apartment. Behind her, shelves bending under the weight of books. In front of her, a six-year-old boy whose mother has just died in childbirth. Elliott asks — not insistently, not reproachfully, simply because a child asks when he does not understand:
“Do you have a family?”

Sandra answers as she has answered herself for decades, whenever someone tried to look behind the wall:
“I have books. My family is books.”

The boy is silent for a moment. Then he says:
“But you can’t talk to books.”

There is no pathos here. No music instructing us to be moved. There is only a pause. Sandra finds no reply. There is none. In that single sentence, the child articulates a truth she herself never wished to name: her world is orderly, self-sufficient, sealed — but it does not answer. Books remain silent.

In L’Attachement, there is not a single scene that attempts to persuade the viewer by force. No declarations of love, no tears on cue, no final scene in which everyone discovers that “family is the most important thing in the world.” Instead, there is something far rarer: the slow, uneven, at times painful birth of a bond where no one intended it.

Sandra — a woman in her fifties, owner of a feminist bookstore, who consciously chose solitude, autonomy, and childlessness — is drawn into the daily life of a family shattered by death: the young widower Alex, six-year-old Elliott, the newborn Lucille. At first, she helps out of necessity. Then out of habit. Finally, something emerges that she fears to name, because to name it is to become attached, and to become attached is to risk loss.

There is no romantic storyline in the conventional sense. Alex and Sandra do not become a couple. There is no kiss under the Christmas tree. There are diaper changes at dawn, drawings slipped under doors, conversations in which no one knows what to say and yet words are spoken. There is Sandra dressing up as a Christmas tree so as not to be too visible — a gesture at once absurd and deeply moving, provoking laughter and a tightening in the throat. This is cinema about the fact that attachment need not be grand, heroic, or even voluntary at the beginning. It only needs to be real.

And France, in February 2026, is drowning in words.

In the Shadow of Violence

The National Assembly has passed — for the second time, by a razor-thin majority — a law on euthanasia. In Lyon, a young man has been buried after being killed while shielding women from the Nemesis collective. The right calls it a political murder; the left calls it a provocation by the far right. IFOP reports are cited endlessly: more than half of young Muslims aged fifteen to twenty-four consider sharia superior to republican law. These numbers have become ammunition in a war with no end: death, violence, separatism, the limits of the body, the limits of community, the limits of what we still call “we.”

In Berlin, the jury rewards openly political cinema. The Golden Bear goes to a film conceived as a manifesto against authoritarianism. One might have assumed that the French — a nation of grand words, political passions, and collective hysteria — would move in the same direction.

And yet, in the midst of this uproar, three César awards go to a film whose strongest argument is that its heroine rediscovers within herself a tenderness she had long pushed to the margins of her own biography.

French cinema has always known how to mirror fracture. Truffaut, in The 400 Blows, showed a child fleeing mother and stepfather, ending on a beach with a face drained of hope, marked only by exhaustion. Chabrol saw marriage as a space in which small evils mature into crime. Godard fragmented love into quotations, politics, and irony until nothing solid remained.

That cinema diagnosed disintegration.

Today’s cinema — at least in this verdict — is not a return to an old order. No one here dreams of patriarchy or the nuclear family of the 1950s, of a woman who “finally realizes her place is with children.” Nor is there a cynical relativism according to which everything is constructed and therefore interchangeable. Instead, there is a stubborn, almost physical belief that after deconstruction, after trauma, after loss, the human being can still piece something back together. That beyond ideology there exists a direct relation between people, tenderness, the simplest gestures — human gestures, not tribal ones, not dictated by the logic of the crowd.

It is precisely here that conservatism — the real one, not the one with torches — regains a voice. Not as an electoral slogan, but as a way of seeing that treats human attachment seriously and without irony. It sees Sandra, afraid of dependence, and does not punish her for that fear. It notices her transformation when, instead of a militant book, she faces a small child and allows a long-suppressed maternal instinct to surface. It sees Alex, unable to be the father of a newborn, and does not mock his helplessness. It does not accuse him of macho indifference, because Alex is neither indifferent nor unfeeling. It sees Elliott searching for a mother in a stranger and allows that movement without shame.

Attachment is older than ideologies, older than laws, older than divisions. In February 2026, as the country burns with grand words about death and identity, French cinema chooses a simple sentence: you cannot talk to books. With another human being — sometimes slowly, hesitantly, wounded — you can.

The award given to this film settles no dispute. It expresses a longing for an elementary bond that precedes all disputes and without which no dispute has meaning.

Margot ROUSSEAU

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Freedom Without Form – A Conservative Reading of Une femme est une femme

The sexual revolution promised emancipation; it often produced displacement. What was torn from institutions retreated into intimacy. Une femme est une femme, the film we are tempted to consider light and playful, reveals with almost involuntary precision how proclaimed freedom can become a new stage for old dominations.

In 1961, Jean-Luc Godard made Une femme est une femme, a film that is still frequently regarded as a minor, charming episode in the history of the French New Wave. It glitters with color, flirts with the American musical, quotes Hollywood while simultaneously parodying it. Anna Karina dances in a cabaret; music abruptly interrupts dialogue; characters look directly into the camera as if to remind us that everything is merely a game. The film is self-aware, ironic, seemingly free from the burden of solemn moral declarations. Precisely for that reason, it deserves to be taken seriously: beneath the mask of playfulness lies a tension the revolution of manners sought to conceal.

The Couple After the Revolution

On the surface, the film’s world is modern. The couple lives together without marriage. The woman works and supports the household. The man reads left-wing newspapers and distances himself from bourgeois morality. There is no Church, no social sanction, no external institution regulating the relationship. We are presented with the model image of an era convinced that abolishing traditional forms would suffice to liberate the individual from structural violence.

The point of rupture, however, is elemental: Angela wants a child. Not in a few years, not someday, but now. Her desire is neither ideological nor whimsical; it is biological, embodied, bound to a time that is not infinite. Émile does not want one. And it is he—crucially—who first proposes what is meant to remain a merely rhetorical solution: if she wants a child so badly, she can go to Alfred. He opens a door he believes no one will walk through.

At that moment, the fundamental paradox of modernity emerges. Émile speaks the language of freedom, yet from the position of one who assumes his sovereignty. “You can” means, in truth, “I know you won’t.” The liberal declaration becomes a test of loyalty. A man can afford to permit because he is convinced that nothing will ultimately escape his control. In a world stripped of institutional forms, psychological control remains—more subtle, harder to grasp, but no less real.

Angela crosses the boundary. She goes to Alfred and enacts what was supposed to remain a rhetorical gesture. This act is neither romantic exaltation nor grand emancipation; it is the testing of the rules. Once declared, they must be verified. And here the fragility of the progressive construction is revealed. Freedom functions as long as it is not exercised. When it becomes real, jealousy, anger, and fear of losing primacy surface.

Conservative cultural criticism begins with a question about form. Form is not mere decoration nor simply an instrument of oppression; it is a structure that shapes relationships and limits the arbitrariness of desire. Marriage, contrary to revolutionary narratives, was not solely a mechanism of control over women. It was also—and perhaps above all—a mechanism binding men. The public character of the union, the social sanction, the clarity of responsibility ensured that decisions could not be revoked without consequence.

In Godard’s world, that form has been rejected as archaic. What remains is a private relationship without frame, dependent on negotiation between two wills. In such a space, the one who manages emotion and narrative more effectively prevails. Émile does not require violence or law to maintain his advantage; it is enough that he believes in his implicit right to primacy. Angela may cross the line, but if returning to the bed means returning to him, the structure reconstitutes itself.

The final scene—the reconciliation in bed, the vision of a future child—is neither the triumph of emancipation nor the man’s unequivocal victory. It signals the end of an experiment and the restoration of equilibrium. A conservative reading sees more than a comic resolution; it sees that abolishing forms does not eliminate the conflict of power but renders it less visible. What was once regulated by institutions migrates into psychology and manipulation.

Playing with the American Musical

In Une femme est une femme, Godard does not quote Hollywood as a disciple but as a polemicist. He declared that he wanted to combine Italian neorealism with the American musical—two traditions he considered an “absolute contradiction.” The musical signified artifice, convention, pure form; neorealism represented the everyday, naturalism, the absence of decor. Their collision was meant to produce a spark. And indeed, the film bears echoes of 1940s and 1950s American cinema: sudden bursts of music, orchestral interruptions of dialogue, playful color and rhythm, moments when Angela’s body seems to function in a different tonal register from the surrounding reality.

Yet this is no classical musical in the spirit of Singin’ in the Rain. In the Hollywood tradition, the musical number orders the world: chaos becomes harmony; conflict dissolves through choreography. In Godard, music fractures rather than unifies. It appears abruptly, cuts off without resolution, leads to no communal uplift. The pastiche is not purely parodic; it is critical. The musical becomes a sign of nostalgia for a form modernity can no longer embrace without irony.

The decisive reference is to Ernst Lubitsch. The name Alfred Lubitsch, borne by the character played by Belmondo, is not accidental. It is an explicit nod to the creator of Trouble in Paradise and Design for Living, master of a comedy of manners in which eroticism hides behind doors, curtains, and ellipses. The “Lubitsch touch” relied on elegant suggestion: the spectator knew more than the screen showed, and the love triangle unfolded as a game of finesse rather than brute confrontation.

Godard takes this model and dismantles it. Alfred, as in Lubitsch, is the third figure, the catalyst of tension, the one who destabilizes the couple. He possesses lightness, charm, distance. But unlike Lubitsch’s heroes, he does not operate within a world governed by shared conventions. In classical comedy, even infidelity followed rules of elegance; someone paid a price, someone yielded, and the ironic ending restored order.

In Godard, Alfred pays no price. He enters the game, accepts the invitation, fulfills his role, and exits nearly unscathed. He need not conquer the woman, declare love, or risk reputation. He is Lubitsch’s shadow—but a diminished one, functioning in a world where convention no longer regulates consequence. This is no elegant comedy of manners but an experiment conducted in normative vacuum.

The film’s very form—its self-irony, conscious citation, bursts of color—recalls Hollywood scale but stripped of faith in possible harmony. In Lubitsch, irony civilized desire; in Godard, it signals the dissolution of a common language. Musical lightness does not lead to accord; it underscores the absence of foundation. The musical number is no longer community but interruption.

A conservative reading discerns here a paradox. Godard, who proclaims rupture with tradition, inadvertently reveals how necessary the form embodied by classical American cinema was. Lubitsch practiced irony, yet his world possessed frames—social, moral, aesthetic. In Une femme est une femme, those frames have been dismantled, and the Hollywood citation resonates as the echo of an order that cannot fully return.

Form Changes, the Mechanism Remains

The sexual revolution promised liberation from patriarchy. In practice, it weakened its external signs. Institutional patriarchy receded; a diffuse, fluid patriarchy remained, operating through the sense of ownership and narrative dominance. The man no longer needs to invoke law or religion; it suffices that he believes he holds the final word, that he decides when the story ends and how it is told.

Seen from this perspective, Godard’s film is not a celebration of free love but an inadvertent illustration of its paradox. Sexual liberation does not abolish tension between man and woman; it changes its language. Explicit prohibitions give way to declarations of freedom. Obligation yields to negotiation. Institution yields to game.

The conservative intuition suggests that human freedom requires form lest it devolve into domination. Form does not destroy freedom; it directs and bounds it. In the relationship between Angela and Émile, the absence of form turns every gesture into a test and every decision into a trial of strength. The child, which might have been the natural culmination of union, becomes an instrument within a struggle for power.

That is why the film remains relevant—not as a manifesto of emancipation nor as accusation, but as a record of transition, the moment when Europe believed it had shed the weight of tradition while merely relocating it into the private sphere. The visible structure gave way to a relationship without frame, where responsibility becomes negotiable and domination harder to name.

Conservative criticism does not mean mechanical return to the past. It means recognizing that form is the condition for civilizing desire. Une femme est une femme shows what happens when form is rejected while desire remains unchanged. Language shifts, decor shifts, tone shifts—but the mechanism of power persists. Freedom without commitment proves less a deliverance than a subtler battlefield.

And perhaps it is in this sense that Godard’s film is more conservative than its first viewers imagined—not because it defends tradition, but because it lucidly exposes how easily progress can become a new mask for old impulses.

Margot ROUSSEAU

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Alone with Dynamite. Pierrot le fou as a Film of Projection, the End of Romanticism, and Narcissistic Politics

 Pierrot le fou is a film about a man incapable of living without the absolute and who, unable to inhabit his own existence, replaces it with the image of a woman and the image of a revolution.

For decades, Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou has been read as a political film: a prelude to May ’68, a critique of consumer society, a meditation on the collapse of the republican myth. That reading is not false, but it remains superficial. Politics is not the structural axis of the film; it is one of the props within the hero’s imagination. The core of the work lies elsewhere — in a projective structure that governs both his love and his political affect. Pierrot le fou is not, at its heart, about revolution. It is about the hunger for the absolute.

To see this, one must contrast Ferdinand with Michel from À bout de souffle. Michel lived in style, in irony, in a playful engagement with the codes of film noir. Cynical but light, he died as one finishes a game. Ferdinand does not play. He takes the world seriously. An intellectual weary of his own milieu, bored by the world of advertising and commodities, he can analyze everything yet cannot act. He retreats into literature, keeps a diary, quotes, aestheticizes. Here emerges the tension famously formulated by Karl Marx in his eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it. Ferdinand embodies an intelligence that has stopped at interpretation. He perceives the void, but he has no project.

His encounter with Marianne is not a relationship; it is a possibility. She is not a fully realized person but a figure of freedom and intensity. Ferdinand looks at her and writes. He turns her into an image, a muse, a screen upon which he projects his own desire. In psychoanalytic terms, Marianne functions as a regulating object. Ferdinand’s ego is not stable; it requires external confirmation. The woman must provide a sense of totality that he cannot generate within himself. What is at stake is not love for another subject, but attachment to his own vision.

When Marianne betrays him, it is not merely the relationship that collapses but the structure of the ego itself. Ferdinand cannot tolerate ambivalence. His desire is split: the absolute or nothing. Here the end of Romanticism reveals itself. The Romantic figure of love as total experience remains intact, but stripped of its metaphysical foundation. Ferdinand demands the absolute in a world that has become banal. He refuses incompleteness. His gestures remain Romantic; the world no longer is.

Politics in the film operates according to the same logic. Echoes of Vietnam, violence, and the tensions of the era appear throughout. One might see in them the anticipation of May ’68. Yet Ferdinand does not engage politically as one commits to a project. He aestheticizes politics. Revolution becomes a fantasy parallel to the woman. If Marianne promises a private absolute, revolution promises a historical one. In both cases, the aim is identical: to fill the void of the self.

Marianne’s name can be read as an allegory of the Republic. For decades, the French intelligentsia projected onto the Republic a myth of liberty and heroism. By the 1960s, that myth was cracking. The real France was ordinary, compromised, intellectually exhausting. Ferdinand cannot accept that ordinariness. Just as he rejects the ordinary woman, he rejects the ordinary Republic. Projection always prevails over reality.

Deepening the analysis further, one may approach Ferdinand from a neuropsychological perspective. The brain operates through a reward system in which dopamine plays a central role — not as simple pleasure, but as anticipation and tension. Stability, repetition, institutional compromise generate low levels of stimulation. Uncertainty, risk, and abrupt rupture generate intense activation. Ferdinand’s relationship with Marianne — unstable, dangerous, saturated with violence — acts as a powerful trigger for the reward system. The vision of revolution functions in the same way. In his passive and bored mind, eroticism and politics reinforce one another as sources of intensity. When one weakens, the other intensifies. This feedback loop produces escalation.

In classical political thought, politics was the art of order and prudence, oriented toward the common good. In the model the film exposes, politics becomes movement for movement’s sake, change for change’s sake. It serves to fill the void of the ego. Ferdinand does not want order; order bores him. He wants an event — a shock capable of wrenching him from inertia. His politics is not classical; it is affective.

The final scene with the dynamite is the logical culmination of this structure. If the woman and the revolution were projections, their collapse leaves a naked ego behind. The suicide is neither a political act nor a Romantic sacrifice; it is a narcissistic gesture, the last attempt to regain control through a total act. The echo of Le Mythe de Sisyphe is unmistakable. Camus proposed revolt against the absurd through perseverance. Ferdinand chooses otherwise. Unable to live without the absolute, he chooses absolute death.

Thus the film is not fundamentally about 1968, but about the mechanism that can lead to 1968 — and to many other explosions. It shows how sexuality and politics may become instruments of affective regulation, how intensity replaces meaning and motion replaces purpose. In this sense, Pierrot le fou is a warning about the projective nature of an uprooted intelligence attempting to fill its emptiness with ideas.

Our own era renders this reading disturbingly current. Politics increasingly functions as an arena of powerful stimuli. Grand narratives — emancipatory or counter-revolutionary — provide intensity and the sensation of participating in historical drama. Ordinariness appears as betrayal; compromise as decline. In such a climate, it becomes easy to eroticize revolution and politicize eros. Ferdinand’s mechanism reappears in new guises.

The most radical thesis, then, is this: Pierrot le fou is not a film about politics, but about projection; not about revolution, but about emptiness; not about a woman’s betrayal, but about the impossibility of living without the absolute. The woman and the revolution are two variants of the same fantasy. When the fantasy shatters, what remains is a man alone with dynamite.

Margot ROUSSEAU

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The Conservative Soul of American Rebellion: Rethinking The Wild One

 Why Marlon Brando’s iconic biker was never a nihilist—and what the film really says about order, maturity, and freedom in America

It has become almost a reflex to read The Wild One as a parable of aimless rebellion: Marlon Brando in a leather jacket, astride a motorcycle, embodying the nihilism of modern youth. I watch the film with an entirely different conviction. For me, it belongs unmistakably to the canon of conservative culture.

Among the icons of American cinema of the 1950s, few films have acquired a myth as durable as The Wild One, directed by László Benedek. The leather jacket, the motorcycle, the casual insolence, Brando’s face—these have long functioned as shorthand for youthful revolt, a cultural cliché detached from the film itself. And yet The Wild One resists this one-dimensional reading. Beneath the surface of a story about “motorcycle hoodlums” lies something far more subversive: the film does not glorify anarchy, but interrogates the moral sources of order, asking whether rebellion—properly understood—might itself be one of them.

Structurally, the film draws heavily on the classical Western. A settled provincial community, emblem of civilizational order, is disrupted by outsiders. Johnny Strabler’s motorcycle gang enters the town like cavalry without a flag: loud, demonstrative, unrooted. The town, in turn, represents the American order of the 1950s—conservative in rhetoric, yet in practice fragile, anxious, and saturated with fear. The moment this order is tested, its true character emerges: not magnanimity or confidence, but pettiness, conformity, and a readiness for violence.

Here the film performs its first decisive reversal. The townspeople—“law-abiding,” “normal,” “responsible”—move with alarming speed from fear to moral hysteria. Their defense of order takes the form of collective aggression, bordering on lynch justice. From this angle, The Wild One appears less as a critique of rebellion than as an exposure of a degenerated conservatism—one that mistakes order for repression and virtue for the panicked defense of the status quo. This is precisely the mechanism warned against by Edmund Burke, who observed that virtue abstracted from prudence and concrete human attachments easily curdles into fanaticism. Benedek’s film stages this degeneration with striking clarity: legality without measure, morality without mercy, community without courage.

Against this backdrop, Johnny Strabler assumes a radically different meaning. Brando does not play him as a nihilist, but as a young man possessed of genuine interior gravity, if still immature. Johnny distances himself from the purely destructive energy of his gang, embodied by Chino. Chino represents rebellion without purpose—noise, chaos, violence for their own sake. Johnny, by contrast, is restrained, ironic, restless. His famous reply to the question “What are you rebelling against?”—“What have you got?”—is often taken as evidence of emptiness. In truth, it is an accusation: an instinctive protest against a civilization that has lost its meaning while continuing to demand obedience.

This rebellion is not revolutionary. It is pre-bourgeois, rooted in an archaic ethic of honor, loyalty, and personal responsibility. Johnny defends his own even when he knows they are wrong; he does not evade confrontation; above all, he judges himself more harshly than he judges others. He belongs to a long American lineage: the outsider who preserves a moral compass precisely because he stands apart. His failure is not a lack of values, but the absence of a form capable of giving them durable expression.

His relationship with Kathie, the sheriff’s daughter, reveals this most clearly. Johnny’s initial advances are confident, almost predatory. Yet he soon withdraws—not from emotional incapacity, but from an intuitive awareness of his own immaturity. To accept her affection would be to assume a responsibility he has not yet earned. His final gesture—leaving her the trophy—is chivalric rather than sentimental: an act of renunciation that doubles as a promise. Authentic love, like authentic manhood, must be forged, not seized.

Seen in this light, The Wild One is firmly situated within a deep current of American thought and literature. Johnny recalls Huck Finn, fleeing “civilized” hypocrisy to save his conscience; he also echoes Holden Caulfield, waging a private war against the phoniness of the adult world. This is no coincidence. From the transcendentalists to classical conservatives, American culture has always been ambivalent toward an order that can justify itself only through force. Emersonian self-reliance is not an invitation to anarchy, but a demand for moral integrity. Thoreau conceived civil disobedience not as revolt, but as the final line of defense for justice.

The climactic courtroom scene gives this intuition its clearest form. Johnny’s salvation does not result from bureaucratic leniency, but from the courage of two ordinary men who choose to speak the truth against the mood of the crowd. Order is restored not by violence, but by conscience. This is conservatism in its classical sense: the primacy of the person over the mass, of truth over hysteria, of virtue over fear.

It is therefore unsurprising that The Wild One was misread by many liberal critics of the 1950s. In an era of moral panic and Senate hearings, any sign of nonconformity was treated as a threat to social order. Yet Johnny’s rebellion is teleological: its end is not destruction, but maturation. His solitary departure at the film’s close is not the triumph of anarchy; it marks the acceptance of a conservative truth—that growth often requires solitude, and freedom demands discipline.

The year of the film’s release also saw the publication of The Conservative Mind by Russell Kirk. Kirk wrote of the “permanent things”: moral order, responsibility, the accumulated wisdom of tradition. Paradoxically, Johnny Strabler stands on their side. His rebellion exposes the hollowness of modern philistinism and reminds us that youthful energy need not be the enemy of order. Properly formed, it may become its deepest source.

The Wild One thus endures as one of the most unexpected conservative films in American cinema. It teaches that true rebellion does not seek to tear down the house, but to refuse life in a house built on falsehood. And that wildness—once educated—can become the foundation of strength rather than its negation.

Margot ROUSSEAU

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Kieslowski. When the New Wave Meets Life

 Early films by Krzysztof Kieślowski rarely enter today’s international conversations about the cinema of the 1960s. And that is a loss, because it is precisely there—within short, austere works still shaped by the discipline of documentary—that one finds one of Eastern Europe’s most compelling responses to the myth of the New Wave hero.

The young Krzysztof Kieślowski—yes, the filmmaker celebrated worldwide for The Decalogue, the Three Colors trilogy, and the remarkable The Double Life of Véronique—was creating work that was arguably more interesting (yes, more interesting than those later masterpieces) in the early phase of his career, when he was inspired by documentary cinema and sought to extract existential meaning through close observation of everyday life in a communist country.

Films of the New Wave reached him, as they did all ambitious filmmakers of the time. He certainly watched them, and although he rarely spoke of them openly, we—viewing his work from a Western perspective—can trace in these early films suggestive paths toward a deeper understanding of New Wave protagonists.

Here I turn to his 1967 student film, made during the penultimate year of his studies at film school: Koncert życzeń (Request Concert). Anyone familiar with Polish cinema of that period will recognize numerous references to the classics of Polish documentary and to the narrative films of Andrzej Munk and Andrzej Wajda. Yet today I choose to view this film through the lens of Godard and Breathless, in order to better grasp the figure of the era’s hero and his confrontation with the crowd.

Fortunately, the film is available online in free access, with English subtitles.

By a river, among the reeds, a tour bus has pulled over—noisy and alcohol-soaked, crude and boorish. From its radio speakers pour popular hits of the time, a Polish version of big beat, a gust of Western rhythm absorbed even by the popular masses of this communist country. Within this group, our attention is immediately drawn to a young man who stands apart from his vulgar companions through his solitude, silence, and abstinence.

Instead of listening to loud music and drinking, he secretly watches a couple in love among the reeds. No, they do nothing remarkable. They comb each other’s hair—the height of tenderness in this film—and then the boy sets about repairing his motorcycle so they can continue their journey. And no, he is no sweetheart, no doting puppy. He is a man who devotes more attention to his motorcycle than to his girlfriend, somewhat brusque, yet evidently appealing to her. Perhaps she had dreamed of just such a boy with a motorcycle.

Then they set off. The bus and the motorcycle. They travel along rural Polish roads, and he looks like a hero from American road movies—or even Belmondo. Though accompanied by his girlfriend, he remains a solitary figure, enclosed within his own world, his own thoughts—so different from the hedonists on the bus. Even if he lacks the good looks or charisma of Belmondo or Dean, we like him for this distance from the mindless crowd.

He is not, as in the classic narratives of rebellion, a gangster or a revolutionary. He lives in a country recently ravaged by revolution. He has his everyday life, his girlfriend, and his beloved motorcycle. In some way, he feels more real than those figures—closer to life itself—and his separateness becomes all the more compelling.

Then comes the turning point. The couple on the motorcycle realizes that part of their luggage has come loose and fallen onto the road. The girl insists that they go back to retrieve the tent attached to it. The boy, reluctant, turns around. It turns out that the lost tent is now in the hands of the vulgar excursionists. They demand money, and seeing that the couple has none, suggest that the girl could come along with them instead.

She looks at her boyfriend without emotion, already perhaps angry at being treated as little more than an accessory to the motorcycle, and says: all right. She gets on the bus.

This triggers the boy’s reaction. He abandons the tent and takes the girl back from the hands of the excursionists. She has achieved what she wanted: his attention.

This story is remarkably simple and restrained, unfolding over fifteen minutes, yet it contains nearly all the elements so essential to narratives of that era: a man on a motorcycle, a woman at his side, a mindless crowd. And yet it is different from all the rest. Unlike in Godard, Kieślowski’s hero steps beyond his own world, beyond his personal code, and makes a choice that the hero of Breathless never makes. He truly moves beyond masculine narcissism and takes the girl by the hand. She, in turn, is unlike the heroine of Agnès Varda, and through a simple bluff achieves what Cléo in Cléo from 5 to 7 does not.

This is the kind of cinema worth returning to, because it uncovers a truth that the New Wave did not always manage to bring to the surface through its ideological and political scaffolding.

These characters have already lived through the revolution. Now they are trying to find their place in life.

Perhaps the true breakthrough, then, does not lie in rebelling against the world, but in knowing how to step outside it—even if only for a moment—without irony or posturing. Kieślowski’s hero does not expose society, does not flirt with nihilism, does not celebrate his own freedom. He does something far more difficult: he takes responsibility for another human being. Where the cinema of the New Wave turned revolution into a way of life, he shows its consequences.

Margot ROUSSEAU

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The Latte Barricade

On One Battle After Another and America’s Longing for a Revolution It Never Had

Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is not a film about revolution.

It is a film about the shame of never having had one.

A diffuse, half-acknowledged shame, but a persistent one: the shame of a country that would like to be able to say—to itself as much as to the world—that it, too, knows what it means to rise against its own state, to break patriotic loyalty, to cross the threshold of political heresy. Anderson’s film is less an act of courage than an inadvertent confession: that of a liberal American elite that dreams of having been regicidal, while remaining, in fact, the heir of administrators.

The United States was born of a rupture that was carefully managed. Its founding rebellion was never a European-style ontological break, but a pragmatic secession. Tocqueville praised it as the triumph of custom over violence; Burke saw in it proof that an order could be transformed without being annihilated. There was no guillotine, no Terror, no collective sacrifice offered to an abstract idea. There was a Constitution, a legal framework, continuity. America did not destroy the old world—it reconfigured it.

That experience shaped everything that followed.

A political order designed to neutralize conflict before it becomes fatal does not generate revolutions in the strong sense of the term. It produces adjustments, corrections, expansions of the frame. What Europe experienced in 1789, 1848, 1871, or 1917—the encounter with the point of no return, the risk of total collapse—America largely avoided. Not out of moral superiority, but because its institutional architecture was built to channel dissent, not to let it turn lethal.

One Battle After Another is an imaginative attempt to compensate for that absence. A film that wants to demonstrate that America, too, can imagine itself as radical; that it can fantasize about confronting its own order; that it can even flirt, aesthetically, with political violence. The gesture presents itself as daring. In reality, it is harmless.

Because what is missing here is not intention—it is stake.

Anderson’s protagonist is not a revolutionary in the European sense. He is someone who plays at being one, like an actor putting on an old costume. His radicalism is retrospective, museum-like, stripped of real danger. He does not enter a conflict capable of destroying him; he reenacts a role, revives a posture, resurrects a style. Revolution is no longer an event—it becomes a reenactment.

But a revolution that can be interrupted at any moment is not a revolution.

It is a performance.

America is a country of men and women who dream of martyrdom without suffering, of dying for a cause that costs them nothing. In the United States, one does not die for ideas, because the system is designed to prevent ideas from becoming mortally dangerous. Every form of opposition is neutralized in advance: transformed into an opinion, a moral stance, a lifestyle choice. One may be against the state, against war, against capitalism—so long as one never attacks the structure itself, which immediately recycles dissent into a harmless signal of virtue.

This is where One Battle After Another reveals its deepest truth. Its “radicalism” is entirely contained within the bounds of prestige culture. Its transgression carries no consequences. It reassures even as it flatters. The film allows its audience to say, we too can be irreverent, while guaranteeing that no one will pay the price.

It is the rebellion of the exemplary student: the louder the protest, the warmer the applause from the institution. But a radicalism that strengthens the social position of the radical is not radicalism at all. It is a function of the system.

A revolution that ends in awards season is not a revolution.

It is a promotion.

Seen from Europe, the enterprise is both ridiculous and pathetic. Ridiculous, because its imaginary of subversion resembles a café-house staging: a latte barricade, a flannel shirt in place of prison fatigues, a cinematic chase where there once were streets, fear, waiting, blood. Pathetic, because it betrays an almost undisguised historical envy—the envy of a nation that would have liked to know the ordeal of the breaking point, without ever accepting the cost.

I do not support the French revolutionaries. I do not support May ’68. I consider many of their legacies deeply destructive. But there is one thing the cinema of Anderson refuses to confront: those who fought knew they were risking everything—prison, exile, sometimes death. The makers of One Battle After Another know, at most, that they risk a hostile review, before being showered with prizes.

American freedom is too expansive to generate genuine revolt. It offers such broad spaces for expression, critique, and dissent that every form of radicalism is immediately absorbed. One can be anti-state on screen. One can aestheticize terrorism. One can “attack the system”—as long as the system benefits.

This is why One Battle After Another is not a film about struggle, but about the very impossibility of struggle in a country that has perfected the art of defusing real conflict. It is the cinema of a nation that would like to have its barricades and its martyrs, but can only produce simulacra.

And that is precisely why the film is instructive—not as a manifesto, but as a symptom. It shows that, in contemporary America, rebellion is permitted on one strict condition: it must remain fictional. It may be radical in form, never in consequence.

Europe knows the price of real conflict—and therefore has no need to romanticize it.

America did not pay that price—and endlessly tries to imagine it.

A latte barricade will always remain a latte barricade.

And a revolution that costs nothing is no revolution at all.

Margot ROUSSEAU

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