Leos Carax made a name for himself in the early-to-mid nineteen-eighties; emerging from the short-lived "cinema du look" movement with a pair of quirky and melancholic romantic fantasy films, Boy Meets Girl (1984) and Mauvais Sang (1986), before taking his central themes of unrequited love and alienated Parisian youth to the next conceivable level with the film Les Amants Du Pont-Neuf (1991). That particular film was supposed to be the one that would finally introduce Carax to a wider cinematic audience; finding the filmmaker refining his usual themes and structural preoccupations with a larger budget and much in the way of creative freedom. Sadly, things didn't go quite to plan; the eventual film - a wildly uneven though often quite captivating blend of romantic folly and violent social realism - went massively over-budget and over-schedule before finally limping out with a limited release almost half a decade later.
As with the other filmmakers at the forefront of the cinema du look movement - Luc Besson and Jean Jacques Beineix - Carax's work is high on style and short on plot; often seeming like a collection of random scenes, linked by one or two reoccurring characters, that accumulate over the course of the film's duration to create a kind of whole. His approach to film-making is very much akin to Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai, in the sense that the film is created from a brief outline and then improvised in the same way that a sculptor or a painter will work, often impressionistically, until a form begins to take shape. Carax however doesn't quite have the narrative scope or the sense of control of someone like Wong, or indeed, the grand duke of improvisational cinema Mike Leigh; with many of his scenes feeling formless and disconnected while his characters remain vague and curiously unsympathetic throughout. These are the major flaws we encounter with Carax's work, and those who are unable to look past the loose structures and wandering approach to narrative will no doubt find much of the director's first two films completely unwatchable - which is a real shame, as despite this, they're both striking and unconventional examples of the cinema du look movement at its most disarming; mixing elements of the Nouvelle Vague with film noir, silent comedy, existentialism and references to early 80's pop culture.
Boy Meets Girl (1984), Carax's first film, typifies this approach; taking the very essence of Jean-Paul Satre's La Nausée and filtering it through the lens of an early Jean-Luc Godard, to create a film that is both playful and romantic, but also lonely and entirely downbeat. The film was made when Carax was twenty-four years old and is very much the kind of film that a gloomy twenty-something loner would make; with its striking black and white cinematography, stylised performances, continual allusions to lost love and alienation and numerous scenes in which our hero wanders the streets as French pop and David Bowie filter in from near-by windows and onto the soundtrack. The film would announce Carax as the infant-terrible of the new French film scene, with his lead actor Denis Lavant becoming a sort of alter-ego type figure; re-appearing as different characters (but with the same name) in Boy Meets Girl, Mauvais Sang and Les Amants Du Pont-Neuf. He's also aided greatly by cinematographer Jean Yves Escoffier, whose use of long tracking shots, imaginative compositions and expressionistic lighting makes Boy Meets Girl one of the most visually stunning films of the 1980's; probably falling somewhere behind Lars von Trier's The Element of Crime and Coppola's One From the Heart. The problems with the film are mostly in the distance we have from the characters; never really getting the chance to know or care for them in a way that would be more beneficial to that ironically bleak and entirely unexpected climax.
The basic plot of the film is loose and meandering; more a moody tone poem centring on a young man cast adrift, lonely and lost within the dark maze of a shimmering late night Paris. After having just split with his lover, the young man, Alex (Denis Lavant), wanders the streets desperate and depressed, eventually happening upon a party hosted by a rich American socialite that he decides to crash. There he meets a fellow lost soul who has also just left split from her lover, and the two begin a complex relationship that grants them a temporary reprieve from the cruelties of everyday existence. This covers at least 30% of the film's actual running time, with Carax padding things out further with lots of beautifully shot sequences of Alex brooding over his lost love and the emptiness of his young life, as well as additional vignettes seemingly unconnected to the central characters at hand that attempt to visually underpin the ideas of loss and love at the heart of the film itself.
These sequences include an opening prologue in which a young mother parks her car by the side of the river and then, over the phone, tells her boyfriend that she is not only in the process of leaving him, but also plans on throwing his unpublished poems into the water. Another memorable sequence finds Alex wandering the streets, as Bowie's 'When I Live My Dream' plays on the soundtrack, and coldly observing a young couple kissing on the bridge, oblivious to his presence. After watching them for a short while, Alex throws a handful of loose change at their feet as if rewarding a street musician for a competent performance. This sequence is a key moment here, as it underpins both the film and Carax's feelings on love and its importance to everything that fits around it. There's also a charming scene in which Mireille (Mireille Perrier), the girl that Alex will later fall in love with, practices a tap dance routine in her one-room apartment, tapping (no pun!) into Carax's combined love for early silent cinema (specifically Chaplin) and Godard's Bande à part.
As with the other filmmakers at the forefront of the cinema du look movement - Luc Besson and Jean Jacques Beineix - Carax's work is high on style and short on plot; often seeming like a collection of random scenes, linked by one or two reoccurring characters, that accumulate over the course of the film's duration to create a kind of whole. His approach to film-making is very much akin to Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai, in the sense that the film is created from a brief outline and then improvised in the same way that a sculptor or a painter will work, often impressionistically, until a form begins to take shape. Carax however doesn't quite have the narrative scope or the sense of control of someone like Wong, or indeed, the grand duke of improvisational cinema Mike Leigh; with many of his scenes feeling formless and disconnected while his characters remain vague and curiously unsympathetic throughout. These are the major flaws we encounter with Carax's work, and those who are unable to look past the loose structures and wandering approach to narrative will no doubt find much of the director's first two films completely unwatchable - which is a real shame, as despite this, they're both striking and unconventional examples of the cinema du look movement at its most disarming; mixing elements of the Nouvelle Vague with film noir, silent comedy, existentialism and references to early 80's pop culture.
Boy Meets Girl (1984), Carax's first film, typifies this approach; taking the very essence of Jean-Paul Satre's La Nausée and filtering it through the lens of an early Jean-Luc Godard, to create a film that is both playful and romantic, but also lonely and entirely downbeat. The film was made when Carax was twenty-four years old and is very much the kind of film that a gloomy twenty-something loner would make; with its striking black and white cinematography, stylised performances, continual allusions to lost love and alienation and numerous scenes in which our hero wanders the streets as French pop and David Bowie filter in from near-by windows and onto the soundtrack. The film would announce Carax as the infant-terrible of the new French film scene, with his lead actor Denis Lavant becoming a sort of alter-ego type figure; re-appearing as different characters (but with the same name) in Boy Meets Girl, Mauvais Sang and Les Amants Du Pont-Neuf. He's also aided greatly by cinematographer Jean Yves Escoffier, whose use of long tracking shots, imaginative compositions and expressionistic lighting makes Boy Meets Girl one of the most visually stunning films of the 1980's; probably falling somewhere behind Lars von Trier's The Element of Crime and Coppola's One From the Heart. The problems with the film are mostly in the distance we have from the characters; never really getting the chance to know or care for them in a way that would be more beneficial to that ironically bleak and entirely unexpected climax.
The basic plot of the film is loose and meandering; more a moody tone poem centring on a young man cast adrift, lonely and lost within the dark maze of a shimmering late night Paris. After having just split with his lover, the young man, Alex (Denis Lavant), wanders the streets desperate and depressed, eventually happening upon a party hosted by a rich American socialite that he decides to crash. There he meets a fellow lost soul who has also just left split from her lover, and the two begin a complex relationship that grants them a temporary reprieve from the cruelties of everyday existence. This covers at least 30% of the film's actual running time, with Carax padding things out further with lots of beautifully shot sequences of Alex brooding over his lost love and the emptiness of his young life, as well as additional vignettes seemingly unconnected to the central characters at hand that attempt to visually underpin the ideas of loss and love at the heart of the film itself.
These sequences include an opening prologue in which a young mother parks her car by the side of the river and then, over the phone, tells her boyfriend that she is not only in the process of leaving him, but also plans on throwing his unpublished poems into the water. Another memorable sequence finds Alex wandering the streets, as Bowie's 'When I Live My Dream' plays on the soundtrack, and coldly observing a young couple kissing on the bridge, oblivious to his presence. After watching them for a short while, Alex throws a handful of loose change at their feet as if rewarding a street musician for a competent performance. This sequence is a key moment here, as it underpins both the film and Carax's feelings on love and its importance to everything that fits around it. There's also a charming scene in which Mireille (Mireille Perrier), the girl that Alex will later fall in love with, practices a tap dance routine in her one-room apartment, tapping (no pun!) into Carax's combined love for early silent cinema (specifically Chaplin) and Godard's Bande à part.