Encontros e Despedidas

'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.

I had never heard of Leos Carax until his Merde segment in last years Tokyo, and his was easily the stand-out the film's three stories. It wasn't my favorite of the shorts, but it was the most unique, and the most iconic. "The Lovers on the Bridge" was the first of his full length features I've seen, a virtuoso romantic film that uses image and music to communicate an exuberant young love that overflows into the poetic. Though he's classified as a neo-nouvelle vogue, his films owe as much to silent cinema as the 60's experimental narratives. His movies are closer to Jean Vigo in "L'atlante", Jean Cocteau, and Guy Maddin, than Godard and Truffaut.

In Boy Meets Girl Carax's 1984 debut he uses black and white and the heavy reliance on visual representation to display emotional states. He combines the exaggerated worlds of Maddin, but based in a reality that never seems quite stable like Cocteau, but by virtue of its expressions it becomes more accessible, emotional, and engaging like Vigo's movies.

The story of Boy Meets Girl is simple, and similar to Carax's two following films which comprise this "Young lovers" trilogy. A boy named Alex played by Denis Lavant (who plays a character named Alex in Carax's next two movies), has just been dumped by his girlfriend who has fallen in love with his best friend. In the first scene he nearly kills his friend on a boardwalk but stops short of murder. He walks around reminded of her by sounds of his neighbors having sex, and daydreams of his girlfriend and best friend getting intimate. He steals records for her and leaves them at his friend's apartment, but avoids contacting either of them directly. He wanders around and finds his way to a party, where he meets a suicidal young woman, and the film becomes part "Breathless" and part "Limelight".

Later he is advised by an old man with sign language to "speak up for yourself...young people today It's like they forgot how to talk." The old man gives an anecdote about working in the days of silent film, and how an actor timid off stage became a confident "lion" when in front of the camera. Heres where the movie tips its hand, but the overt reference to silent film is a crucial scene, since it overlaps the style of the film (silent and expressionist), with the content (a lovelorn young man trying to work up the courage to say and do the things he really wants to). Though Alex is pensive at first and a torrent of romantic words tumbling out of him by the end, he is the shy actor who becomes a lion thanks to the films magnification of his inward feelings which aren't easy to nail down from moment to moment, aside from a desire to fall in love.

There is a scene in the film where Alex retreats from the party into a room where the guests have stashed their children and babies, all crying in a chorus that fills that room, until he turns on a tape of a children's show making them fall silent. Unexpectedly due a glitch the TV ends up playing a secret bathroom camera which reveals the hostess sobbing to herself into her wig about someone she misses. Even as Carax is self-reflexive and self deprecating of the very kind of angst ridden coming of age tale he is trying to tell (the room full of whining infants), he's mature enough to see through the initial irony to the lovelorn in everything the film crosses. Even the rich old, bell of the ball has a brother she misses. In another scene an ex astronaut stares at the moon he once walked on in his youth while sipping a cocktail in silence.

Though indebted to films before talkies, Carax is a master of music, knowing when to pipe in the Dead Kennedy's "Holiday in Cambodia", or an early David Bowie song, the sounds of a man playing piano, or of a girl softly humming.

In Boy Meets Girl, when someone gets their heart broken we see blood pour from their shirt, when a couple kiss on the sidewalk they spin 360 degrees as if attached to a carousel, when Alex enters a party an feels out of place, its because the most interesting people in the world really are in attendance; like the famous author who can't speak because of a bullet lodged in his brain, or the miss universe of 1950 standing just across from the astronaut. This film is the missing link between Jean Piere Jenuet, Michel Gondry, and Wes Anderson, whose stylistic flourishes and quirky tales of whimsy, all have a parallel with different visuals, musical, and emotional cues in these Carax movies.

Every line of dialog, every piece of music and every effect and edit in this movie resonated with me on some emotional level, some I lack words to articulate. There are many tales of a boy meeting a girl, but rather than just explore the banal details of any particular event this movie captures the ecstatic truth of adolescent passion and disappointment. The other movies you want to watch can wait. See this first. If I were to make films, I would want them to be like this, in fact I wish all films were like this, where the ephemeral becomes larger than life, and life itself becomes a dream.

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.

Boy Meets Girl casts a recurring actor to play Alexandre, the protoganist who is the namesake of the young writer/director's real name, and Mireille as a cinematic version of herfself, the then girlfriend of director (pseudonym Leos Carax). This is an ingenious indie debut feature film with a flair for visual style (cinematography from Jean-Yves Escoffier) and beautiful use of black and white.

The.story is a love story but finds many ways to make it less dramatic and tragic with comedy, poetry and philosophy. The dialogues and monologues are crisp. Perhaps the greateat strenght of the.screenplay, yet the silent momemts, music and movement also conterbalance the heavy reflections on art, war, friendship, life and love.

A.gentle mix of video, music, dance, signing, poetry, metacognition and metaphysics with contemplative pacing and editing. Few films achieve this and eapecially om the first try for a film writer/director immense joy to watch. Expect European slower shots and French New Wave style if you are use the US constant drama and movement.

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.