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IMDbPro

Mauvais sang

  • 1986
  • Tous publics
  • 1h 56m
IMDb RATING
7.2/10
9.8K
YOUR RATING
Juliette Binoche and Denis Lavant in Mauvais sang (1986)
Leos Carax made his international breakthrough with this swoon-inducing portrait of love among thieves. In the near future, an aging crime lord (Michel Piccoli) recruits young delinquent Alex (Denis Lavant) to steal a locked-up serum designed to fight a mysterious STD. When Alex falls for his boss’s girlfriend (a radiant Juliette Binoche), Mauvais Sang becomes something rarer: an ecstatic depiction of what it feels like to be young, restless and madly in love. With its balletic gestures and bold primary colors, much of the film plays as if through the eyes of its lovesick protagonist. And it hinges on one of the most thrilling scenes in modern movies: Lavant sprinting and cartwheeling through the Parisian night to David Bowie’s “Modern Love,” a bundle of desires set briefly and wildly free.
Play trailer1:45
1 Video
93 Photos
CrimeDramaRomanceThriller

As a deadly virus which infects people who have loveless sex sweeps Paris, a lonely pariah attempts to steal a potent antidote, only to fall for the mistress of his partner-in-crime. Is the ... Read allAs a deadly virus which infects people who have loveless sex sweeps Paris, a lonely pariah attempts to steal a potent antidote, only to fall for the mistress of his partner-in-crime. Is the infectious young love the cure to the bad blood?As a deadly virus which infects people who have loveless sex sweeps Paris, a lonely pariah attempts to steal a potent antidote, only to fall for the mistress of his partner-in-crime. Is the infectious young love the cure to the bad blood?

  • Director
    • Leos Carax
  • Writer
    • Leos Carax
  • Stars
    • Michel Piccoli
    • Juliette Binoche
    • Denis Lavant
  • See production info at IMDbPro
  • IMDb RATING
    7.2/10
    9.8K
    YOUR RATING
    • Director
      • Leos Carax
    • Writer
      • Leos Carax
    • Stars
      • Michel Piccoli
      • Juliette Binoche
      • Denis Lavant
    • 30User reviews
    • 64Critic reviews
    • 74Metascore
  • See production info at IMDbPro
    • Awards
      • 3 wins & 6 nominations total

    Videos1

    MAUVAIS SANG Trailer (restored version, Carlotta Films US 2013)
    Trailer 1:45
    MAUVAIS SANG Trailer (restored version, Carlotta Films US 2013)

    Photos93

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    Top cast18

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    Michel Piccoli
    Michel Piccoli
    • Marc
    Juliette Binoche
    Juliette Binoche
    • Anna
    Denis Lavant
    Denis Lavant
    • Alex
    Hans Meyer
    Hans Meyer
    • Hans
    Julie Delpy
    Julie Delpy
    • Lise
    Carroll Brooks
    • The American woman
    Hugo Pratt
    • Boris
    Mireille Perrier
    Mireille Perrier
    • The young mother
    Serge Reggiani
    Serge Reggiani
    • Charlie
    Jérôme Zucca
    Jérôme Zucca
    • Thomas
    Paul Handford
    Charles Schmitt
    François Négret
    François Négret
    Philippe Fretun
    Thomas Peckre
    Ralph Brown
    Eric Vasberg
      Leos Carax
      Leos Carax
      • Le voyeur du quartier
      • (uncredited)
      • Director
        • Leos Carax
      • Writer
        • Leos Carax
      • All cast & crew
      • Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

      User reviews30

      7.29.8K
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      Featured reviews

      ThreeSadTigers

      One of the most striking, unique and eccentric films of the 1980's

      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.
      6Red-Barracuda

      Ambitious yet uneven Leos Carax film

      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.
      chaos-rampant

      Joint internal flight

      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.
      8loganx-2

      The Love Without Love

      The Alex Trilogy which is made up of this "Boy Meets Girl" and "The Lovers On The Bridge" is a great cinematic treasure, everyone who likes movies should try to watch. I guarantee anyone who watches this will at least like one. This sci-fi/heist movie second part of the trilogy is set in a world of venereal disease where "The Love without Love" sex without love, can be fatal. Alex is the son of a great thief, whose old mates hire him in the hopes that the apple hasn't fallen far from the tree. Alex falls in love Juliette Binoche, one of his fellow criminals daughter/lover(I was a bit confused about that part). Nothing else needs to be said because nothing else is important. Leos Carax's films are poetry they whimsical and stylish and romantic and personal and frenzied. Cinema is a stage where Carax's Alex finds himself repeatedly at odds with the world and in search of connection, sometimes he finds it, sometimes he doesn't. Sometimes he, lives sometimes he dies. The only constants are David Bowie songs, dancing, and general awesomeness. Denis Lavant's rocket sprint to "Modern Love" is as close to sublime as movies get.
      7aciessi

      Modern Love

      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.

      Storyline

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      Did you know

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      • Trivia
        Julie Delpy says she came out of filming this movie traumatized: "Yes, it was a very difficult shoot. I had a motorcycle accident. In order to make the insurance work, I wasn't taken to the doctor right away. As a result, my leg became gangrenous - one more day and it was amputation. Moreover Leos Carax was not easy. The actress was not easy either. It was a set of things where I was really traumatized when I got out of this movie. It was at the limit where I wondered if I wanted to continue what. It wasn't a pleasant shoot, no", Delpy unveiled without detour, thus engaging in the passage on 'the actress' that was Juliette Binoche.
      • Quotes

        Alex: I was a frighteningly silent child, apparently. I kept silent... but that's not right. Silence keeps us.

      • Connections
        Featured in À la folie, pas du tout: Episode dated 16 November 1986 (1986)
      • Soundtracks
        Simple Symphony Op. 4 - Variation on a theme of Franck Bridge Op. 10
        Written by Benjamin Britten

        Chandos Records

        ed. OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

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      FAQ19

      • How long is Bad Blood?Powered by Alexa

      Details

      Edit
      • Release date
        • November 26, 1986 (France)
      • Countries of origin
        • France
        • Switzerland
      • Official sites
        • Juliette Binoche: The Art of Being - Official Fansite
        • Official site (Spain)
      • Language
        • French
      • Also known as
        • Bad Blood
      • Filming locations
        • Rue Emile Richard, Paris 14, Paris, France(crossing the American Lady on the way to the airfield)
      • Production companies
        • Les Films Plain Chant
        • Soprofilms
        • FR3 Films Production
      • See more company credits at IMDbPro

      Box office

      Edit
      • Gross US & Canada
        • $40,988
      • Opening weekend US & Canada
        • $8,482
        • Dec 1, 2013
      • Gross worldwide
        • $70,105
      See detailed box office info on IMDbPro

      Tech specs

      Edit
      • Runtime
        • 1h 56m(116 min)
      • Color
        • Color
      • Sound mix
        • Mono
      • Aspect ratio
        • 1.66 : 1

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