Film Review
Ingloriously sandwiched between the smouldering embers of the Nouvelle Vague
era and the massive insurgence of auteur talent in the 1990s, the 1980s was
a comparatively fallow decade for French cinema. With box office figures
heading ever downwards, some were even anticipating the demise of cinema altogether.
This was all part of a wider pattern of doom and gloom in France as the harsh
economic realities of the post-industrial era began to hit home with a vengeance.
Most afflicted in this period of cultural, political and economic decline
were the nation's younger citizens, who had to contend not only with escalating
youth unemployment but also the sudden emergence of a new mystery killer
disease (AIDS) that had huge implications when it came to matters of relationships
and sex. This period of alienation and angst was effectively reflected
in the work of a handful of promising new film directors offering a more
self-consciously visual approach to filmmaking that was pejoratively dubbed
the 'Cinéma du look' by the prominent French critic Raphael
Bassan. Jean-Jacques Beineix's
Diva (1981)
and Luc Besson's
Subway (1985) captured
the spirit of the time perfectly with their vibrant portrayals of marginalised
youth rebelling against a corrupt, over-authoritarian and crumbling state,
but the one film that was most powerfully evocative of the funereal
air
du temps was Leos Carax's deliriously weird blend of urban fairytale
and sci-fi noir-thriller,
Mauvais sang.
Taking its title from a section of Arthur Rimbaud's 1873 prose poem
Une
saison en enfer,
Mauvais sang (a.k.a.
Bad Blood) was Carax's
daring follow-up to his idiosyncratic debut feature
Boy Meets Girl
(1984), which had received enthusiastic attention from the critics after taking
the Prix de la jeunesse at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival. That film
had launched not only Carax's career (although he had made one noteworthy
short film before this,
Strangulation Blues, in 1980), but also that
of his lead actor Denis Lavant, a former acrobat who would feature in three
of his subsequent films -
Mauvais sang,
Les Amants du Pont-Neuf
(1992) and
Holy Motors (2012).
It was with his second feature, however, that Carax's potential to become
the leading auteur in French cinema of the post-Nouvelle Vague era was most
readily apparent. Favourably received by some critics,
Mauvais sang
was honoured with the prestigious Prix Louis Delluc in 1986 (possibly the
highest accolade offered to a French film) and received three César
nominations in 1987, in the categories of Best Actress (Juliette Binoche),
Most Promising Actress (Julie Delpy) and Best Cinematography (Jean-Yves Escoffier).
Critical and public reaction to the film may have been mixed but there was
no doubt that Leos Carax had arrived and would have a major part to play in
reviving France's faltering film industry in the late 1980s, early 1990s.
A former critic (albeit for a short time) on the
Cahiers du cinéma,
Carax appears to draw most of his influences for
Mauvais sang from
the films of his illustrious predecessor Jean-Luc Godard (who, incidentally,
was a great fan of Rimbaud). Visual and thematic references to Godard's
sci-fi noir thriller
Alphaville
(1965) and noir-framed romantic idylls
À bout de souffle (1960)
and
Pierrot le fou (1965) are
not hard to spot, although allusions to many other 'serious' directors (from
Jean Grémillon to Jean Cocteau and François Truffaut) can be found peppering Carax's unhinged
and unsettlingly oneiric narrative, which is far less concerned with telling
a coherent story and more interested in getting across the emotional upheavals
of the two main characters as they pursue an impossible love affair whilst
getting caught up in a ludicrous B-movie caper plot that is certain to propel
them to an ineluctable doom. The transcendent romance
that is the heart and soul of Carax's film mirrors almost exactly the
one portrayed by Jean Gabin and Michèle Morgan in
Marcel Carné's
Le Quai des brumes
(1938) (another recipient of the Prix Louis Delluc). In this light,
Mauvais sang
reveals itself as a deftly Godardian deconstruction of the fatalistic poetic realist, proto-noir
classics of the 1930s, sliced and diced in a way that makes Carax appear less
a methodical forensic pathologist and more a wildly fanatical Mack the Knife
as he hacks his way through cinematic cadavers of the past in search of his
own creative identity.
The detractors of the Cinéma du look (of which there were quite a
few) were all too ready to fault the films of Beineix, Besson and Carax for
their apparent preoccupation with 'style over substance', not understanding
that for these three filmmakers style
was the substance, the means
of expressing the truth of the characters (their feelings and identities),
the details of the plot being a virtual irrelevance that was hardly worth
bothering with. In this regard, the 'B-B-C trio' are very much in contact
with the ethos of the French New Wave and the earlier Avant Garde movement
of the 1920s. Of the three, Carax was the one who seemed to be most
fully committed to this radically new vision of cinema (Beineix ran out of
steam after his third film, Besson was more motivated by commercial success
as a mainstream director and producer). It is highly appropriate that
Mauvais sang, the film in which Carax appears to be at his most scarily
uninhibited and poetically inclined, should take its inspiration from Arthur
Rimbaud, the
enfant terrible of French poetry who brought about something
of a cultural revolution in his late teens through his tacit rejection of
all forms of convention (in just about every aspect of his life). Carax
was 25 when he made his second film and already his work seems to be deeply
infused with the spirit of 19th century literature's most famous teen rebel,
and what other French filmmaker of this era embraced so fully Rimbaud's golden
edict that 'it is necessary to be absolutely modern'?
'Love must be reinvented' is one of
A Season in Hell's most famous
lines and it would seem to be the perfect mantra for the time of the AIDS
pandemic.
Mauvais sang may be dressed up as a classic noir-style
gangster film revolving around a well-planned heist which (in the best tradition
of Jean-Pierre Melville) goes horribly awry, but it is primarily a
love story for an age in which sex and death had never been more strongly
associated. What the protagonists Alex (Denis Lavant) and Anna (Juliette
Binoche) experience is not the usual erotic entanglement that audiences would
expect from a French romantic drama (even in the 1980s), but something on
a much higher spiritual plane. Through some incredibly inspired (and occasionally mad)
use of massive close-ups, camera motion and speeded up photography, Carax
brings a profound poetic resonance to his depiction of the most platonic
of love affairs, in which the redeeming power of love in its purest form
can be seen and felt through its subtle impact on an AIDS-era
Romeo and
Juliet.
One way in which Carax's 'reinvented love' is expressed is through
Mauvais
sang's imaginative use of colour. Notice how bold patches of primary
colours keep bursting through the oppressive drab grey-browns that pervade
the set in just about every shot. Most impactful are the bold incursions
of electric blue and blazing scarlet red, which are particularly effective
in the items of clothing worn by Juliette Binoche (who is at her most absolutely
stunning in this, her second major screen role after her acclaimed debut
in Andre Téchiné's
Rendez-vous).
Then there is the memorable sequence in which Alex and Anna spray each other
with shaving foam - an echo of the famous pillow fight scene in Jean Vigo's
Zéro de conduite (1933).
This is the closest the film gets to eroticism, with both characters
carried away in a delirium of childlike ecstasy as they exchange highly suggestive
jets of white foam. These incongruous eruptions of blue, white and
red naturally call to mind the French tricoleur and the ideals of
liberté,
fraternité and
égalité on which the Republic
was originally founded. The manifest lack of liberty, fraternity and
equality in Carax's soul-crushingly dreary urban labyrinth imply that these
have become nothing more than forgotten ideals, which only love - in is truest
form - can resurrect from the stifling consumer age gloom. Is it possible
that the Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski was influenced by this film
for his subsequent
Trois couleurs
trilogy (1993) (the first part of which features Binoche in a similarly
enigmatic role)?
The shards of stark primary colours punctuating the life-sapping
grisaille
of everyday life can be interpreted as exterior expressions of the primal
feelings that are stirring in Alex's troubled soul as he suddenly comes to
realise what true love is - not the meaningless hormonal frenzy that leads
to death (through the new killer disease STBO), but a drastic awakening of
the soul that allows him to fully connect with himself and form a complete
adult identity. Alex's connection with Anna is of a far more tangible
kind than the one she apparently has with her present, much older lover Marc,
played by Michel Piccoli at his lugubrious best. (At the end of the
film, Piccoli joins up with Serge Regianni, providing its most overt reference
to Jean-Pierre Melville's distinctive crime world as both actors had appeared
in his 1962 film
Le Doulos).
The conventional carnality of Marc's relationship with Anna is made clear
in the more prosaic way in which the characters are photographed and positioned,
whilst their emotional separation is cryingly obvious in the parachute jumping
sequence in which Anna ends up clinging to Alex as she goes helplessly into
free-fall, her other lover watching on from a distance. There are multiple
ironies in the fact that Alex is coerced into stealing a cure for the killer
disease STBO, dying in the attempt to procure a serum for which he apparently
has no need.
It is with Alex's sudden realisation that he has bumped up against true love
that
Mauvais sang reaches its vertiginous height with a
characteristic burst of Carax ingenuity and excess. Like a butterfly
tentatively emerging from its chrysalis and taking flight for the first time,
Alex visibly transforms in front of our eyes as, leaving Marc's appartment,
he begins wandering down a deserted street at night, his gawky movements slowly turning into a kind
of robot dance which evolves into an acrobatic dance that includes high leaps
and cartwheels, the pace quickening to a break-neck sprint - all to the accompaniment
of David Bowie's
Modern Love. The camera stays locked on the
suddenly energised youth in an exhilarating single tracking shot that lasts
a full minute, building to a dramatic crescendo when he
suddenly arrives back where he started. (It's odd that this
sequence should begin with Alex clutching his stomach and stumbling - as
if anticipating his ultimate fate at the end of the film.)
For this unexpected digression into performance art
Denis Lavant uses body movement like a master poet
to express what his character feels more eloquently and meaningfully
than any amount of mere words. It is a truly astonishing
sequence and what makes it so powerful
is that it breaks the pattern that Carax sticks with for the rest
of the film, which consists mostly of short shots jarringly assembled
as if to further fragment, rather than make coherent, the fractured
elliptical narrative. For the minute when
we witness Alex's metamorphosis he becomes the sole focus of our attention
and there is a visceral thrill at the depth of connection we feel as redemptive
love works its magic on the screen in front of us.
Mauvais sang is an extraordinary piece of filmmaking but it is by
no means an easy film to engage with. It is quite a challenge keeping up
with the abrupt switches in tone and style as the classic noir thriller takes in
urban realism, lyrical romanticism and the oddest intrusions of surreal humour.
Like much of Carax's work, it
takes multiple viewings before the film's full impact hits home and you begin to
appreciate it for the rare original masterpiece it undoubtedly is.
The wildly disjointed narrative and unrelenting concentrated focus on the
subjective experiences of the chronically mixed-up protagonists makes this
a challenging work (albeit an immensely rewarding one if you have the patience
and stamina to stick with it). Anyone expecting something along the
lines of the classic French policier (a genre that had been pretty well done
to death by the time the film came out) risks being somewhat aggrieved by
Carax's Godardian manhandling of the familiar gangster film tropes, which
are employed only as the loosest possible framework for the central romance.
Cinematically,
Mauvais sang is every bit as daring and inventive as
Carax's next feature,
Les Amants du Pont-Neuf, but lacking that film's
measured restraint and narrative coherence, it is too easily written off
as a lesser work.
And yet there is a good case for this untethered sophomore offering to be
regarded as the director's signature film, the one in which he was freest
and most willing to express his unique vision of cinema, utterly fearless
of what the critics or audiences might make of it. In the past forty
years, Leos Carax has made just six full-length films, and whilst each of
them has a special quality of indefinable genius,
Mauvais sang stands
out as the definitive Carax film - bold, brilliant and bonkers in roughly
equal measure. A film that evinces the delicate dark poetry of Cocteau,
the cordite-scented gangster milieu of Melville, the anti-convention fanaticism
of Godard and the unwavering authenticity of Bresson is surely a scintillating
pot pourri that no committed cinema enthusiast can resist. The
same rebellious spirit that made Arthur Rimbaud the most remarkable French
poet of his day shines through Carax's work, nowhere more blindingly that
in
Mauvais sang, his bitter elegy to the French mores of the mid-1980s.
© James Travers 2023
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Next Leos Carax film:
Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (1991)