Boy Meets Girl

'Boy Meets Girl ' was Leos Carax's first movie, and is remarkably mature for a first film!! Leos went on to tell a similar story in his next films. One of the great things about this film is that it reminds me of the glory days of the French New Wave, because it's fresh and has a new way of telling us something we may have heard before.The best thing is that the film has several great visual sequences that prove Carax has the ability to express things visually that alot of directors could only accomplish by using words. It's hard to track this one down, but if you get a chance make sure you see it. Then see the rest of Leos Carax's movies, one of the most visionary directors at work in the contemporary film scene.

Leos Carax made his own stamp of filmic storytelling in Black and White with fascinating use of light and framing of imagery. Can't forget the frame with the 4-pane window shadow in a room with sparse furniture - so simply captured that the mood and tone is instantly felt. It's practically a piece of art just looking at that frame in that moment in time: before Alex opens the door coming in, and once again when he leaves us to this arresting image on screen.

Carax's style of telling his dramatic stories does border on melodramatic touches. This 1984 "Boy Meets Girl", his first feature film, showed us his poignant understanding of the younger set in love. The emotional entanglements and angst - struggling to be loved by the one you want the love from and disappointment awaits. Such a common premise is dealt in an uncommon insightful depiction, with graphically framed imageries. The ending demonstrates his use of subtle yet telling visual approach, letting the audience know what's really going on without words uttered. Come to think of it, that's how he ended his films - the strength of soundless or non-dialog scenes tells it all impressively.

It's certainly not your usual teen angst movie - Carax's films are not simple by any means. Emotional layers, love in conflict and flight are ever present. Regular street scenes and night shots by the river with lighted bridge afar are his common backdrops. Discourses on love and relationships you will find. If you like to go steps further and really plunge into French conversations of love, sex, and relationships, try Jean Eustache's 1973 "The Mother and the Whore" (La Maman et la putain; NFE = not for everyone), also shot in B/W. Let Jean-Pierre Leaud's Alexandre lead you through the 3 hrs. 30 mins. verbal journey, with Bernadette Lafont as Marie "la maman", and Francoise Lebrun as Veronika "la putain".

A film whose - very poetic - staging does not manage to hide the emptiness and the total neutrality of its action.

Aesthetically, Boy meets Girl, as a Leos Carax's very first film, has a lot of personnality, and this well-mastered daring is pleasing to see. The contrast of black and white is very well managed, along with the lighting of the film, we could see here a tribute to the expressionism era .

The photography is very well organized, the decorations, the compositions on the screen again testify to a certain stylistic audacity. Nevertheless, it flounders. This love story half-lived, or lived weakly, interspersed with impromptu lyrical outbursts in the dialogues hardly convinces. It does not work by its lack of fluidity, of coherence. The film itself breaks up between poetic softness and clumsy ardor, badly executed or badly played. The rambling of the young hero Alex is indeed the only constant line of the film, whose romance is difficult to discern, in a flood of poetic wanderings that end up plumbing the film. While Boy Meets Girl attracts lovers of poetry with its aesthetic, it puts off by its inconsistency and by the emptiness of its scenario.

Beautifully shot, but tediously slow. Even with all the references to French New Wave filmmaking from a couple of decades before, the story didn't hold my interest, and the characters were hard to care for. There was not enough effort put into developing them beyond damaged, emotionally fragile people. Carax instead labored over other scenes, like the three full minutes spent with the young man playing pinball near the end, at a point where I was already hoping the remaining run time would pass quickly.

The cinematography is undeniable, however, and there is a certain lonely mood captured here that may resonate, if you can put up with a story that moves in fits and starts. Can love, like a phoenix, rise out of the ashes of former relationships for these two people, we wonder when they talk at length in the kitchen while a party carries on outside, maybe the film's most interesting scene. It had its moments, but isn't one I'd recommend.

I hadn't even been aware of this film when it was passed my way by a very kind fellow IMDb user. It is the debut feature by Leos Carax, a film he directed when he was only 24 years old. Like most of the other films in the cinéma du look movement, in which Carax was a key member, it's not very story-driven and instead favours strange plot tangents and a cool distance from its characters. The basic narrative tells a story of a depressed young man who meets a suicidal young woman after both of them have just suffered rejections from their respective partners. They enter a relationship of sorts.

It feels like Carax must have been influenced by the early 80's Francis Ford Coppola films One from the Heart (1981) and Rumble Fish (1983); like the former he often told simple romantic-drama stories in highly stylized cinematic ways and like the latter in Boy Meets Girl he has did it using crisp black and white photography. It is a very visual and typically left-of-centre approach that has been taken to the material. Unlike most films based around a romance, it takes an hour before the two title characters actually meet at an off-kilter party populated by eccentric characters. So much of the focus is really on other things with a number of little unusual vignettes making up the whole. Its story of young love and alienated youth isn't really a very uplifting one in fairness and could easily be described as a tragedy. Although it isn't necessarily as involving on an emotional level as it might be due to Carax style which always takes a somewhat removed perspective from his characters. I'm not entirely sure that this is the best approach for story-lines involving romance as these work best when you have more empathy and involvement with the characters in my opinion. But I still have to admire the look and feel of the film though which is pretty interesting for the most part. In addition, despite not having an actual score, there is interesting use of music, with a night-time sequence on the Pont Neuf bridge set to an obscure very early David Bowie track, while at another moment a character unexpectedly puts on the record 'Holiday in Cambodia' by the hard-core punk band the Dead Kennedys. These moments cement the fact that this was a film that resolutely celebrated popular culture. All-in-all, while it is not an entirely engaging experience this is a very confident film for a 24 year old novice film-maker to knock out.