Mauvais sang (1986)
Directed by Leos Carax

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.

Film Synopsis

Paris, 1986.  As Halley's Comet makes its closest approach to Earth, the capital is experiencing an unprecedented heat wave.  Tensions are already high following the outbreak of a deadly new virus, STBO, which infects anyone who indulges in loveless intercourse.  A cure for the mysterious killer disease has been developed but it is being kept in a secure secret laboratory whilst the death toll mounts.  Three gangsters - Marc, Hans and Jean - plan to break into the laboratory and steal the valuable serum, selling it to a rival pharmaceuticals company to pay off a large debt they owe to a shady female moneylender known as The American.  When Jean is killed on the Paris Metro, his accomplices decide to recruit his son Alex, a teen punk, hoping to make use of his talents as a nimble prestidigitator.  Grateful for the opportunity to start a new life and make some real money, Alex leaves his girlfriend Lise and joins Marc in his Paris hideaway, where he quickly falls under the spell of Marc's attractive young lover, Anna.

Although Anna finds herself drawn to the wild and unpredictable adolescent, she is too emotionally attached to her present lover to give herself to him.  Their shared moments of intimacy are beautiful and intense but remain platonic - the purest, most satisfying love either has known.  A practice parachute jump goes well but the theft of the serum does not go as planned.  After triggering a sophisticated alarm system, Alex narrowly escapes capture by holding a gun to his own head.   Her patience exhausted, the American sends her trigger-happy armed minions after Marc and his accomplices.  Alex rejoins his criminal associates but as they take flight he reveals he has received a serious gunshot wound to the stomach.  The fugitive gangsters have one hope - to escape to Switzerland with a private plane.  But before they can reach the aerodrome Alex succumbs to his injuries, dying in the arms of his beloved Anna.