Early films by Leos Carax re-released

The films of Leos Karaks “Bad Blood” (“Mauvais sang”, 1986) and “Boy Meets Girl” (“Boy Meets Girl”, 1983) were re-released. The phenomenon of the legendary French director is still intrigued Andrey Plakhov.

Carax entered the cinema of the 1980s as the foster child of the magazine Les Cahiers du cinema and the heir to the concept of the “new wave”, its lifestyle, which implies a complete identification of the life of the author and his work. The director’s hero Alex, who never changes his name from picture to picture, is an obvious outsider, restless, homeless, almost degenerate. But it is he – more precisely, the actor Denis Lavan – who is entrusted with embodying the author’s reflections, the languor of the spirit and body, and the relationship with the Woman.

In his feature debut Boy Meets Girl, Carax starred his then girlfriend, aspiring actress Mireille Perrier, but could not choose an actor he would trust to play “himself.” Until I met my peer Denis Lavan at an agency for unemployed artists. In “Bad Blood”, and then in “Lovers from the Pont Neuf”, Laban played out the same plot: “a guy meets a girl”, only the girl was already different – the one with whom Carax now lived, Juliette Binoche. Their romance, when both became famous, became the property of gossip columns, but for Carax himself from the very beginning it was a reflection of the nostalgic myths of the “new wave” – ​​in particular, the love affair of the young anarchist Godard and his muse Anna Karina.

“Boy Meets Girl” is a black-and-white movie exercise on the traditional avant-garde theme of “mad love”. The guy and the girl are looking for each other, converge, diverge, they are physically attracted to each other, but they are woven from different materials, and the peak of rapprochement is murder-suicide with the help of scissors inspired by Godard’s Mad Pierrot. There is almost no dialogue between the characters. A plastic metaphor for search, mutual attraction is the checkered coloring of the scarf, which first falls on the pavement from the neck of another woman, then ends up in the hands of another man, and finally, as a result of a deadly fight, gets to Alex.

In the first full-length film by Carax, despite the locality of its plot and form, the beginnings of this director’s cosmogony and megalomania are already visible. The camera is constantly rushing out of cramped rooms to the panorama of the starry sky, to the silhouettes of marvelous Parisian bridges. “Bad Blood” is staged on a much larger scale. She represented France in the competition of the Berlin Festival and, competing in extravagance with Alexander Sokurov’s Mournful Insensibility, received the Alfred Bauer Prize, which encouraged innovation and experimentation. On top of the detective plot (the struggle for the possession of a vaccine against a deadly disease resembling AIDS), here is a game of whimsical memory, throwing to the surface and quotes from the classic films, and Godard’s mise-en-scenes, and the musical phrases of Prokofiev or Britten, and the sensual hypnotic rapids of the video clip, and the frantic melody of the early David Bowie. All this is accompanied by thick, wet tones, striking contrast of warm night shots, hyper-realistic scenery with a predominance of red, white and black, but also with splashes of blue and yellow.

The viewer of the film finds himself either in the angular anti-world of guignol, or in the shell of advertising gloss, or in a dizzying parachute fall, where two lovers intertwined in an embrace. This strange harmony, woven from dissonances, is held together by Alex-Lavan, a boy beyond his age, with the habits of a hypersensitive mutant, reminiscent of another Alex, from A Clockwork Orange, and slightly – our Plumbum from the film by Vadim Abdrashitov, who appeared at the same time. This wild creature, by its very plasticity, psychophysics, evokes a mixture of conflicting feelings, the main among which is sadness. Carax’s film, littered at first glance with detective confusion, turns out to be, in fact, the purest lyric-philosophical meditation on the theme of loneliness, fear and guilt, redemption through love and death. The stylized crime genre becomes a metaphor for an inexorable fate.

Leos Carax entered the world of cinema at the same time as Jean-Jacques Benex and Luc Besson. Critics united this directorial trinity with the abbreviation VVS and dubbed it representatives of the “new wave” or “new baroque”. But Besson went into commercial cinema, Benex did not advance beyond the discoveries of his early films. Only Carax retained a long breath. Even today he draws inspiration from French romanticism – a counterbalance to French rationality.