Purely Joyful Movie!

Just what I expected

Best movie of this year hands down!

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

CAHIERS DU CINÉMA: There are no rules to cinema. No set way of getting from point A to point B, or a general expectation on the part of the filmmaker to include certain themes and conventions for the benefit of the audience. A film should make us think and feel; the rest is purely secondary. At twenty-six years old, Leos Carax understood this notion perfectly; taking inspiration from the early Nouvelle Vague films of director Jean Luc Godard and producing a work that underlined the key themes already established in his bleak and beautiful debut feature, Boy Meets Girl (1984), albeit, with a more clearly-defined and pronounced approach to the conventions of genre and narrative. Like Godard's early work, such as À bout de soufflé (1960), Bande à part (1964) and Pierrot le fou (1965), Mauvais Sang (1986) focuses on a number of weighty, existentialist themes - such as unrequited love and the alienation of Parisian youth - disguised by a series of hard-boiled genre conventions - brazenly lifted from post-war crime cinema and early film noir - and an approach to character that is filled with wit, emotion and searing imagination.L'ÉNFANT TERRIBLE: As ever with Carax, the results are unconventional and highly unique, as we follow a story that is deliberately trivialised in comparison to the more important hopes and dreams of the central characters, whose collective spirit of defiance, adventure and melancholic yearning spill out into the actual visual presentation of the film itself. Here, the similarities to Boy Meets Girl are clear, with lead actor Denis Lavant once again portraying a misfit character named Alex who here comes to act as a representation for Carax himself. However, unlike Boy Meets Girl, the film is this time presented in bold and vivid colour, with much of the action taking place on purposely built sets that fall somewhere between the traditional Gothic architecture of actual, rural France and the cold, retro-futurist design of Terry Gilliam's masterpiece Brazil (1985). Once again, the design of the film reflects the ideas behind the characters, with the notions of escape and of closing yourself off from the outside world and indulging in romantic folly being central to the underlining spirit of the characters, which are here, more important than the widely recognisable aspects of narrative development.CINÉMA DU LOOK: By visualising the film in such a manner, Carax is able to create a stark and somewhat surreal nocturnal underworld where his characters hide out - free from the rules of society and the conventions of time - with the production design, cars and costumes all standing as deliberate anachronisms to maintain the idea of a world removed from our own. It also works with the ironic, referential tone, in which elements of Godard give way to Chapin, who gives way to Welles, who gives way to West Side Story (1961), and all wrapped up in a preposterous plot that ties in with other French films of this cinematic period - later dubbed the "cinema du look" - in particular, Diva (1981) by Jean Jacques Beineix and Subway (1985) by Luc Besson. The basic outline of the story behind Mauvais Sang involves Lavant's young street punk running away from responsibility and inadvertently ending up helping two elderly criminals in a plot to steal an AIDS like virus from a futuristic, high-security laboratory, so that they can pay off an out-standing debt to a matriarchal Mafia boss. Along the way he dodges an old adversary and the girlfriend that he left behind and falls head over heels in love with the young fiancé of one of the criminals that he's there to help.L'AMOUR MODERN: This strand of the narrative is the one that is most clearly defined here, both in the romanticised nature of the film and the world view of its characters, as well as the appropriation of the American crime-film references and pretensions to post-war melodrama. Here, Alex is quite literally a boy playing the part of a gangster, with his self-consciously hard-boiled dialog, swagger and no nonsense attitude as he talks about his time spent in a young offender's institute, and how it has turned his insides into cement. Through his relationship with Anna - herself a cinematic reference to Anna Karina, right down to the Vivre sa Vie (1962) haircut - the weight of Alex's internal angst and macho bravado begins to erode, leading to that near-iconic moment in which our hero, realising his unspoken love for Anna, runs down the street in an exaggerated tracking shot, skipping, jumping and cart-wheeling to the sound Bowie's Modern Love. An astounding and unforgettable sequence that comes out of nowhere and immediately reinforces the film's unique sense of romantic fantasy and pure escapism against a backdrop of would-be gangster theatrics.STRANGULATION BLUES: The juxtaposition between grit, melodrama, fantasy and genre subversion is characteristic of Carax's work, with the self-consciously artificial world of the film and the playful and yet decidedly romantic nature of Alex and Anna's relationship tying together the themes of Boy Meets Girl with those of the director's third film, the grand cinematic "disaster" Les Amants Du Pont-Neuf (1991). Like those films, Mauvais Sang uses concept and narrative merely to present a reason for the characters to meet and interact, as the rest of the film develops from 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. With this film, Carax created a fascinating cinematic abstraction of young love and alienation, unfolding in a world in which the representation of the audience is a young voyeur played by the director himself; a keen comment on the nature of film, and yet another fascinating component to this striking, unique and highly imaginative ode to love, escapism, and cinema itself.

A few years ago, I came across a PAL VHS copy of Leos Carax's debut feature, BOY MEETS GIRL (1984), and now that I've caught up with the rest of his filmography, I regret passing on it...! BAD BLOOD promises to be several things – a treatise on a society coming to its first realization of the ravages of a sexually-transmitted disease (read AIDS), a caper movie involving the stealing of a highly-requested anti-"AIDS" serum, etc. – but ends up being a romantic love story and a vintage Hollywood pastiche of sorts: Carax admitted in an interview that the film was inspired by the Alan Ladd/Raoul Walsh actioner, SALTY O' ROURKE (1945)! The film has a good mix of veteran (Michel Piccoli and Serge Reggiani) and upcoming talent (Juliette Binoche and Julie Delpy) but the main character is played by Denis Levant; curiously enough, he dies in this one but in Carax's following movie, THE LOVERS OF THE BRIDGE (1991; also with Levant and Binoche), the main character sports the same name of the one Levant plays here and, as a matter of fact, Binoche also makes references to Julien and Marion who also "feature" in LOVERS!! Actually, it appears that Carax's first 3 features are supposed to be taken as a loose trilogy.While BAD BLOOD isn't a total success, it is occasionally quite inspired: when David Bowie's "Modern Love" blurts out from the radio, Levant goes out dancing in the streets (pun intended) but his exuberant dance routine is soon cut short when Binoche turns off the radio; a completely irrelevant sepia-tinged sequence of a gamine and her little child is set to the strains of Charlie Chaplin's score from THE KID (1921); Piccoli and Reggiani's first meeting in an airfield becomes a pantomime routine akin to Silent slapstick comedies; and, most hilariously, an American thug also after the serum mistakes a fellow diner in a restaurant for Jean Cocteau but when Levant tells him that Cocteau is dead, he deadpans: "No…look..he's moving!".

You will remember Mauvais Sang because of: - its unique & very recognizable director's style; - visual experiments that have broadened the cinema art horizon (please don't forget that this film was released in 1986 and was copied since then in many other films and videos, which makes it less experimental nowadays); - high energy level due to variation in static close-ups and dynamic scenes shot by the moving camera; - love story that touches but stays far away from clichés; - plot that plays with stereotypes of a gangster film and leaves enough space for your imagination.Visual ideas of Leos Carax can be encountered in, for instance, Romeo + Juliet by Buz Luhrmann, Delicatessen by Jeunet & Caro and a recent art house hit - Le Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain by Jean-Pierre Jeunet.

You would not see such a treatment to a film in mainstream Hollywood, perhaps not even in independents. There are all the elements of a gangster movie and then some: the fall guy, the family talk, the villains visit (the boss is an American woman), the secret ploy, the deftly heist, the car (and motorcycle) chases, and flying of bullets. Writer-director Leos Carax spared no expense in delivering his stylish French gangster film with pizzazz - he included a bold parachuting from a plane aerial sequence, all this in addition to his usual stock of heart and soul characters, and graphic cinematography with visual poetry. The central pursuit of love is never left out in a Carax story. In fact we have more than double dosage here: Denis Levant's Alex has Julie Delpy's Lise faithfully haunting him, besides his loving attraction to Juliette Binoche's Anna, who is hypnotically in love with Michel Piccoli's veteran gangster Marc. Carax's script and dialogs are well polished (the subtitles did do justice). There are mentions of Haley's Comet; repeat references to hot weather; hi-tech allusions of "Darley-Wilkinson" with moneymaking "STBO" cure to a deadly virus. There is a certain playfulness to the tone of the whole film: besides demonstrations of Alex's ventriloquial skill, there are love interludes; pop music delivery with frames of Levant's foot a-running and dancing; casual sing-alongs in a convertible during an escape; undying exchanges while gut's a-bleeding; Hans Meyer, playing Marc's partner Hans, provided dashes of humor through his presence. This is definitely a film to appreciate. "Mauvais Sang" was made in 1986 and many of its elements and scenes were mimicked in later Hollywood/independent flicks, affirming the creative genius in Leos Carax, a French filmmaker extraordinaire. Thanks to Landmark Theatres in the Bay Area, foreign film goers in San Francisco were given a chance to see all four of Leos Carax feature films. Bravo!