Mauvais sang

Having seen only his incredibly intense 1999 film, Pola X, I didn't exactly know what to expect with Bad Blood. The film is as a whole not as effective as the later film, but it serves to solidify Leos Carax in my mind as a truly great director. I love both films, and this one is definitely flawed, but the poetry which comes through onto the screen is absolutely incredible. Alex running down the street to Bowie, the motorcycle getaway, and the amazingly passionate and beautiful final scenes will remain with me for a while... the film is exquisitely wild and reckless and is truly innovative in the way it's put together. Even as I write this, shot after shot and scene after scene resurface in my mind, all of them worthy of mention, and all of them gorgeous and shattering in their own way. Carax is a deserving heir to the thrones erected by the new wave. Bad Blood is the work of a master, whether the film itself is a masterpiece or not... The characters are wonderfully crafted with very nice performances by everyone, it's very watchable and very human poetry of the highest calibre. See it, see a Leos Carax film, any of his films - I'm going to track down Boy Meets Girl and Lovers on the Bridge as soon as I can.

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.

'By the time you finally learn how to live, it's too late.' This brilliant, bizarre, unique film is one more proof that Leos Carax is a genius. The film is so extreme in its technique and imagery that it can be placed in no category. Everything about it is original, even its derivative aspects. Carax is unconventional even when copying or echoing. Sometimes the film is so mannered and arch that it resembles a cartoon strip. But this is playfully misleading. At other times, the film is desperately emotional and heart-rending. It even has hyper-realistic close-ups of microscopic details. The lighting is crisp, hyper-real also. It is so hyper-real that it is utterly surreal. It is designed to oscillate between the real and the imagined constantly, at an ever increasing rate, in order to drive the viewer mad. Soon the viewer will be almost as insane as the director, or so the director hopes, and then the viewer will at last understand. One of the aims of the director is to reduce the viewer to pulp, but not just any pulp: he must be reduced to pulp fiction. Everything is a joke, but also everything is serious. Nothing has only one side to it. The heavily stylized approach is shown in every respect. The sets are carefully colour-coded, with red a major theme, appearing in ties and on walls, in velvet, in blood, often contrasted with black. There is a spectacular, manically exciting sequence where the young hero (Denis Lavant) impulsively runs down the street doing a spontaneous dance to a David Bowie song, and the camera tracks along beside him for a very long time. This kind of 'moving mania' (not unlike a totally berserk form of 'movie mania') has the restless and impassioned insistence upon constant motion that one sees in his next film, 'The Lovers of the Pont Neuf' with the speed boat on the Seine and the fireworks. In the story, also written by Carax, we have so much influence of Andre Breton's novel 'Nadja': love for the impossible woman who is obviously insane in her irresistibly fascinating way, chance encounters, the miraculous erupting in everyday life, impossible visions (when the hero first sees Juliette Binoche on a bus, but cannot make out her features properly through the glass, and yet knows that he loves her already because he 'feels' her). We have the impossibly beautiful Julie Delpy aged only 19, and already in her sixth film, with the unformed face of an infant, and yet her eyes deep pools of passion already, the eyes of a passionate child in that perfect Madonna face. Juliette Binoche is 22 but looks twelve, and her beauty is greater even than that of Delpy's, we cannot take our eyes off her, her calm is the calm of a lake when there is no wind, her face is the face of a lake with no clouds, her beauty is the beauty of a lake in the sunset, the sleekness of her movements is that of a fish glimpsed for a moment as it leaps above the surface of that lake. The story is purposely mocked by the film, its pretext of a thriller plot so absurd that we are encouraged to laugh, realizing there is no plot, there is only life. A virus is spreading: it is killing those who make love without loving, and the vaccine must be stolen. Such is the 'plot'. There are various inside jokes. The director himself plays 'the neighbourhood voyeur, who peeks through the window every night', a fine rebuke of the director against himself. Then there is an earnest conversation is a café where a hardened killer and gangster suddenly breaks off and insists that he sees Jean Cocteau on the other side of the room with his back turned, until he is reminded that Jean Cocteau is dead. There are many intensely stylized shots of the backs of heads. Features and faces are often masked: at one point, Binoche peeks through a hole she has torn in a paper napkin. In another scene, Delpy has a scarf stretched across her face below her eyes for the entire time. There is an interlude in the film in the middle of the night, when all the characters in the story are asleep. So of course, Carax being Carax, he shows them all sleeping in their respective beds in their respective abodes, just to let us see that side of them; the sinister American woman gangster ('the Americaine') has her lipstick all smudged as she lies unconscious, lost in her undoubtedly vicious dream. The young lead is called Alex, which is Carax's real first name (the name Leos Carax being an anagram, the man Leos Carax being an enigma, Alex Dupont being Leos Carax, this film being Alex Dupont being Leos Carax being a voyeur). Everything is original. It is true that some of it verges on farce, saved at the last minute by Carax's brilliance from jumping in front of the Metro just as a man does in the opening sequence. Carax is always about to throw himself and his film in front of the oncoming train. He is always about to throw his train in front of an oncoming film. He is always about to be serious, he is always serious. He is a daredevil. Just as his characters throw themselves into the sky from a plane, parachuting for no evident reason, with Binoche passing out before she can pull her ripcord but being saved by the hero who clutches her in his arms and pulls his for them both (we see shots of them looking down from inside the parachute, and how he filmed those I really cannot imagine), so Carax pulls his own ripcord over and over again, with every minute of the film, and saves it repeatedly from tumbling to earth, with the awe-inspiring audacity of his manic, uncontrollable creativity.

You will remember Mauvais Sang because of: - its unique & very recognizable director's style; - visual experiments that have broadened the cinema art horizon (please don't forget that this film was released in 1986 and was copied since then in many other films and videos, which makes it less experimental nowadays); - high energy level due to variation in static close-ups and dynamic scenes shot by the moving camera; - love story that touches but stays far away from clichés; - plot that plays with stereotypes of a gangster film and leaves enough space for your imagination.

Visual ideas of Leos Carax can be encountered in, for instance, Romeo + Juliet by Buz Luhrmann, Delicatessen by Jeunet & Caro and a recent art house hit - Le Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain by Jean-Pierre Jeunet.

Mauvais Sang made me feel cooler just for watching it-like I'd chain-smoked a Gauloises in a neon-lit alley while reciting poetry to nobody in particular. It's moody, stylish, and occasionally baffling, but there's real heart pulsing beneath all that noir-drenched angst. I loved Juliette Binoche smouldering on screen, and Julie Delpy has that effortlessly aloof charm that just works. And Dennis Lavant-my god, the man dances. That scene? Electric. I honestly think it should be a law: Lavant must dance in every film. Not just the ones he's in-every film. The plot wobbles here and there, but the vibes? Impeccable.