You Need to Feed The Eyes For Your Dreams: The Cinema of Leos Carax | Features

That film would be “Mauvais Sang” (1986)—alternately known as “Bad Blood” and “The Night is Young”—a project that starts off as a sexy crime thriller with vaguely futuristic overtones before eventually shedding its genre skin for something more personal and passionate. Set in Paris in the not-too-distant future, the story revolves around STBO, a mysterious new sexually transmitted disease that is spread by and killing people who make love without any sort of emotional involvement—the affliction mostly affects the young and only one of the people having sex has to be doing it free of emotion for both to come down with it. A serum to serve as an antidote for STBO has apparently been developed but it has inexplicably been locked away so that those in need of it cannot access it. Two older criminals, Marc (Michel Piccoli) and Hans (Hans Meyer) are commissioned by a mysterious American woman (Carroll Brooks) into stealing it for her, and Marc then turns around and hires Alex (Levant again, though not the same character from “Boy Meets Girl”), a would-be gambler who is the son of a late former cohort, to assist in the crime. Things get very complicated when Alex, who has just broken up with his young girlfriend, Lise (Julie Delpy in an early role), meets Marc’s mistress, Anna (Juliette Binoche)—he naturally falls instantly in love with her but while she likes him enough, she still loves Marc. To further muddy things up, Lise is unwilling to give up Marc that easily and turns up on the day of the theft.

Once again, one can feel the influence of Godard—“Alphaville” immediately leaps to mind thanks to its vague sci-fi trappings—throughout, especially in the way that Carax presents viewers with the elements of a standard crime thriller: noble thieves, callow punks, daring heists, sexy dames, and the inevitable double-crosses. But Carax shows little interest here in making a typical genre exercise. The film is a vast improvement on “Boy Meets Girl” because while his visual style is just as captivating as before (most notably in a gorgeous sequence in which Alex, in a fit of what passes for joy for him, runs, jumps and dances over the course of several city blocks as David Bowie’s “Modern Love” plays on the radio), the drama feels as if it were generated from actual human experience, and not just from things gleaned from screenings at the Cinematheque Francais. Even if you watch it without knowing all of the various autobiographical elements at play—ranging from the long periods of silence that Carax used to undertake as a kid that are part of Alex’s character (inspiring the derisive nickname “Chatterbox”), to the fact that he and Binoche were dating at the time of its making—you get the feeling of a genuine beating heart just beneath the gorgeous surface elements, especially once Alex and Anna meet and the narrative takes on a more urgent focus that has little to do with the heist. Granted, the story’s concept of the faux-AIDS disease has not aged especially well but even that can be sort of forgiven—it feels more like the kind of conceit that a lovelorn high schooler might have come up with for a creative writing assignment out of innocence instead of cynicism. Although Carax would go on to make better films, “Mauvais Sang” is the one that showed that he was no mere un seul tour dans son sac and is probably the best entry point for newcomers to his oeuvre.

On paper, Carax’s third film, “Les Amants du Pont-Neuf” did not initially appear to be different from his earlier efforts—who could have possibly dreamed it would inspire a production that would live in infamy and make both the film and Carax into instant legends, both for good and for ill. Set primarily on and around the fames Parisian bridge name-checked in the title around the time of France’s Bicentennial celebration in 1989, the film charts the romance between Alex (Levant yet again), an alcoholic street performer who lives on the bridge along with older vagrant Hans (Klaus Michael Gruber), and Michelle (Binoche), a young artist from an upper-middle-class home who has chosen a life on the streets in response to a failed love affair and a seemingly incurable disease that is slowly destroying her eyesight. Hans objects to the presence of Michelle, ostensibly because he feels that the bridge is much too dangerous of a place for a woman, but she is there to stay, helping Alex with his performances and becoming more and more dependent on him as her eyesight gets progressively worse. Miraculously, a cure for Michelle’s illness is discovered and her family begins blanketing seemingly every available surface in the city with posters asking for information regarding her whereabouts. Fearing that Michelle will spurn him for good as soon as she regains her eyesight and money, Alex goes to increasingly desperate measures in his attempts to keep her in the dark about the cure and her family’s hunt for her.