e-70733 Both the editing and the soundtrack display the avant-garde art idea of a young film maker. However, this slightly conservative story clearly does not support such a strong desire for expression. The mainly reason of current situation probably is that Leos Carax, the director of the film, didn't figure out how to expertly combine a commercial script with private style during that time. Therefore, though some independent parts is amazing and outstanding, the final result is somehow a bit out of control.

morrison-dylan-fan Taking part in a French challenge event on ICM,I started trying to decide what the final film to watch would be. Seeing auteur Leos Carax's Boy Meets Girl and The Lovers on the Bridge during my own 100 days/100 French films last year,I decided that it was the perfect time to find out the age of the night.The plot:After the death of his dad,Alex is hired by his dad's old friends/fellow gangsters Marc and Hans to steal the only known created cure to a sexual virus. Leaving his girlfriend Lise,Alex joins up to prepare for the task. Staying at Marc's place,Alex meets Marc's young lover Anna. Soon falling in love for Anna,Alex starts pushing his mission to steal the cure aside,in order to focus on his new mission of getting Anna from Marc.View on the film:Joining the movement after it was established by Jean-Jacques Beineix's 1981 Diva,writer/directing auteur Leos Carax (who also has a cameo) & cinematographer Jean-Yves Escoffier fully embrace the stylisation of Cinema du Look. Caught in the middle of the lo-fi Boy Meets Girl and the blockbuster Lovers on the Bridge,Carax begins to expand on his major themes,with Girl's David Bowie tunes and rustic,crisp black and white overlapping images following Alex on the robbery. Lining the walls surrounding Alex and Anna in decadent wall paper,Carax drinks up his first colour film with ravishing Cinema du Look bright greens,blues,reds and neon yellow being splashed across the screen. Gliding along the colours,Carax and Escoffier unleash hyper-stylised camera moves such as extended tracking shots with razor sharp jump- cuts that give the tale a Sci- Fi atmosphere.Starting as a hired hand heist mission,the screenplay by Carax uses Anna's feeling for the older Marc to draw Alex as the young Cinema du Look loner. Displaying an impressive level of ambition,Carax builds on his troubled young romance theme with an off-beat Sci-Fi twist. Whilst not going into too much detail over how the virus was created,Carax spins the Sci-Fi elements to give an urgency to Alex's love for Anna. Made before she went to Hollywood, Julie Delpy gives an enticing,siren call as Lise,while Juliette Binoche gives Anna a fittingly quirky attitude. Playing an "Alex" for the 2nd of 3 times in Carax's work, Denis Lavant gives a great performance,which finely balances Alex's slight cockiness with a sweet,romantic naivety,that reveals itself to Anna as the night gets old.

timmy_501 With his second feature Mauvais Sang, Leos Carax blends the standard genre conventions of the heist film and the disaffected youth film. These generic conventions allow Carax to take a shortcut in providing the basic elements of plot and character so that he can focus on stylistic innovation. The result is a poetic, dazzling film packed with memorable visual touches and camera-work. Particularly exhilarating are the frequent point of view shots, especially the ones that involve characters on motorcycles. A few of the bolder shots, such as one in which the camera spins toward abstraction as it covers the scattered lights of a cityscape at night, would not seem out of place in an experimental film by someone such as Stan Brakhage. Yet the plot, which concerns a young man's attempts to steal a serum that will help him earn a large sum of money so that he can move to a new town and begin a new life, is actually a bit too perfunctory and becomes bogged down as it spends too much time on a rather uninteresting relationship he forms with one of his accomplices' mistress. Nevertheless, this early effort from Carax hints at the potential that later films such as The Lovers on the Bridge would more thoroughly fulfill as it offers a certain unpolished charm all its own.

Ruby Liang (ruby_fff) You would not see such a treatment to a film in mainstream Hollywood, perhaps not even in independents. There are all the elements of a gangster movie and then some: the fall guy, the family talk, the villains visit (the boss is an American woman), the secret ploy, the deftly heist, the car (and motorcycle) chases, and flying of bullets. Writer-director Leos Carax spared no expense in delivering his stylish French gangster film with pizzazz - he included a bold parachuting from a plane aerial sequence, all this in addition to his usual stock of heart and soul characters, and graphic cinematography with visual poetry. The central pursuit of love is never left out in a Carax story. In fact we have more than double dosage here: Denis Levant's Alex has Julie Delpy's Lise faithfully haunting him, besides his loving attraction to Juliette Binoche's Anna, who is hypnotically in love with Michel Piccoli's veteran gangster Marc. Carax's script and dialogs are well polished (the subtitles did do justice). There are mentions of Haley's Comet; repeat references to hot weather; hi-tech allusions of "Darley-Wilkinson" with moneymaking "STBO" cure to a deadly virus. There is a certain playfulness to the tone of the whole film: besides demonstrations of Alex's ventriloquial skill, there are love interludes; pop music delivery with frames of Levant's foot a-running and dancing; casual sing-alongs in a convertible during an escape; undying exchanges while gut's a-bleeding; Hans Meyer, playing Marc's partner Hans, provided dashes of humor through his presence. This is definitely a film to appreciate. "Mauvais Sang" was made in 1986 and many of its elements and scenes were mimicked in later Hollywood/independent flicks, affirming the creative genius in Leos Carax, a French filmmaker extraordinaire. Thanks to Landmark Theatres in the Bay Area, foreign film goers in San Francisco were given a chance to see all four of Leos Carax feature films. Bravo!