Boy Meets Girl

Visual treat as almost all Carax films. What a debut!

The protagonist Alex (Denis Lavant) rarely smiles. He does not drink or smoke. and makes films or wants to make them. The girl Mirielle (Mirielle Perrier) is extraordinarily attractive, if you discount her bad teeth in the film. The film has a sequence about a mute silent film crew member who jokes about what deaf people saw in silent films by lipreading that escaped normal people. The film has a brief shot tipping Carax's hat to Welles' "Citizen Kane." Both made their debut films at the same age of 24. Both wrote their original scripts

Denis Lavant has repeatedly worked for Carax, Mirielle Perrier again in Carax's Mauvais Sang.

The use of David Bowie's song "When I live my dream" (sung by Bowie). is a fascinating touch.

The visuals and the use of music and silences are a trademark of Carax. Lavant wears checked jacket and holds a scarf of of his previous love with the same design. When he is with Mirielle, the jacket is off andhis striped shirt matches the stripes of Mirielle's clothes.

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".

The first film by Leos Carax - piercing, sincere. Carax is only 23 years old - a young genius - a genius in depicting the nuances of youthful depression and the loneliness of human existence. The heroine is like a touching Pierrot. Like a fragile crystal flower. And the general impression is the unbearable fragility and beauty of being.

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.

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.