Anthony Iessi
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.
chaos-rampant
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.
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.
writers_reign
Seems I'm in the minority here but I'll take it on the chin and won't open a vein just yet. Carax clearly has his admirers and we can only guess at the reasons. Mabe youthful rebellion against a mainstream way of telling a story; maybe disciples of the 'new'different-is- automatically-BETTER school. Who knows. I guess it's fair to say that I Endured this movie rather than Enjoyed it. Depending on your point of view Carax has an endearing and/or irritating habit of fading in the middle of a scene and then coming back to the same point. Why? You tell me. In its favor it does feature two of the now loveliest (in 1986 they were merely pretty) French actresses in Julie Delpy and Juliette Binoche plus two all-time great actors in Michel Piccoli and Serge Reggiani (albeit only a cameo for the latter) but against this it throws in one of those leading men who seem to get cast inexplicably given they lack virtually every criteria for leading men, I'm thinking of the two Vincents, Cassell and Gallo, Benoit Magimal et al. In this case it's Denis Lavant (a favorite of Carax) who resembles nothing so much as a sullen Russ Tamblyn and is one anchovy short of a pizza given that he starts out by dumping Julie Delpy, who is herself one egg short of an omelette by being head-over-heels in love with this yob in the first place. Plot? You don't want to know, believe me.
AD
