Sangue Ruim

You have amazing scenes here. The energetic and nail biting heist scene, the sky-diving scene, and of course, the scene in which Chatterbox runs down the street to "Modern Love" by David Bowie. How shamelessly Noah Baumbauch stole this scene for Frances Ha, which compared to Mauvais Sang is a sophomore year, film school project. This is a master class in filmmaking. However, it's conversation scenes lag on for far too long, don't amount to much, and extend the run time of the film. It didn't need to be two hours.

This second film by Leos Carax is one which continued his focus on romance between alienated youth. It is a more expansive film than the earlier Boy Meets Girl (1984) but is overall a little less satisfying. More than any of his other films, this one plays around with characters and motives of genre cinema. In this case, we have a heist plot as the basis for what is otherwise typical Carax material. The McGuffin is a sexually transmitted virus that effects people who engage in sex with no emotional involvement. A serum which can cure the disease is locked away in a high security government building. Marc, a gangster in deep debt enlists the services of Alex the teenage son of one of his friends to steal the precious drug. Alex falls in love with Marc's lover Anna.

In all honesty, the crime story was dealt with in a very half-hearted manner. I guess when you consider that the virus is of such an absurdly whimsical nature it's not so surprising that it's not exactly taken very seriously. Like all the other Carax films, you really have to get on board with his very cinematic style to have any chance of appreciating them. This one has its share of expressive moments that happen with little story-based sense but which are highly cinematic such as where Denis Lavant suddenly runs along a street while sound-tracked to David Bowie's 'Modern Love', it's a very typical Carax scene where the character can express his feelings in a manner that is pure cinema. Likewise, the impressively shot parachute scene is also coming from a similar place. On the whole, this is a very visual film with good use of colour throughout. I personally think that this is the least of the 'Alex' trilogy through. It feels a little too uneven and bitty overall, like the director had a lot of ideas but with no coherent plan of how to connect them together effectively. So, I would say that this is ultimately an interesting but flawed film.

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.

I think music used throughout this reveals quite a bit of the cinematic exercise.

• Prokofiev's Roméo and Juliette, so a ballet, a cinematic opera on forbidden love between youth that aches to dream. Love that cannot be consummated in the ugly day of light and has to take to dreams, liebestod, Tristan and Isolde.

• Limelight tied into this, that precious bit of Chaplin beneath the big old sappy narratives that was purely evocative body, that was in essence a dance between innocence and star-crossed fate.

• David Bowie, 'Modern Love' aptly enough, so the rush of purely energetic instrumentation, dazzling camera beats, irony, New Wave atonality, in this case the song randomly caught on radio and meant to guide feelings, a dadaist gesture. Denis Lavant leaps across the frame with his wiry seething-petite frame that reminds a bit of the old silent comedians, he's a real pleasure to watch just move.

In something like Beau Travail also with Lavant and operatic, space is arranged bodily, the whole thing is cinematic and flows. Not so here. The guy responsible for this wants to be a little like Godard, so we have the interminable recitations, the poetry, the deliberately crude crime plot where you only need a gun and a girl, always Godard's weaker spots.

This too bad. Because there are visual moments here that left me practically giddy, for example love as a matter of leaping from a plane, a matter of joint flight and tenderly balancing mid-air.

Instead we get a patchy, stuttery ride that only now and then blossoms into some internal scenery.

The opportunity missed is that the eye dances but is not fully consumed with its musical capacity. Nouvelle Vague ruins this by proxy. I like to think that Wong Kar Wai saw this and immediately knew which parts worked.

Wonderful performances by Denis Lavant (best performance as mute prisoner in "The Night of the Kings"), Juliette Binoche (best performance is in "Certified Copy") and Julie Delpy (best performance "Three colors-White"). Carax is to be credited for casting all three and getting great performances when all of them were relatively unknown. Lavant has worked with Carax on his films (in "Boy meets girl" and in "Lovers on the Bridge", where his characters are called Alex!; and in "Holy Motors")

Lavant's character is called Chatterbox. While character avers he was a silent child and survived 15 months of his served prison term by being silent. Yet, he is the most talkative character in the film, who is very knowledgeable about art and artists, correcting a "heavy" that Jean Cocteau is not alive but dead (Carax was possibly influenced by Cocteau). The film's script has several such nuggets.

Though the film has a weird tale, the strength is first of all in the use of color--clothes, exterior walls, furniture--transforming each scene into a painting.

The second awesome sequence is Denis Lavant's athletic dance in the empty street keeping to the beat of David Bowie's song "Modern Love," which is supposed to reflect the weird theme of the film of loveless sex. Carax' choice of Prokofieff's and Britten's music is creditable.

Carax worked with cinematographer Jean-Yves Escoffier until his death in 2003. Another good decision made by Carax for whom visuals, music and actors matter.