Boy Meets Girl
Synopsis
Leos Carax’s brilliant feature debut follows the relationship of an aspiring filmmaker (Denis Lavant), who has just been left by his lover and a suicidal young woman (Mireille Perrier), who is also reeling from a failed romance.
Our take
Citizen Kane, Hiroshima, mon amour, 400 Blows: rare first films that seem to come to us fully formed, of shocking vision and freshness. The dizzyingly romantic debut film of Léos Carax is just that: the birth of a radically new cinema that was sensitive to the old yet embarks on its own unique path.
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Awards & Festivals
Cannes Film Festival
1984 | Winner: Award of the Youth (French Film)
The New York Film Festival
1985
2013
Boy Meets Girlis in love with movies, and it conjures a movie world of inventively lo-fi density and dexterity. It’s also in love with textures and props and mysteries and anecdotes. This film could serve as the working definition of a sketchbook movie, as Carax appears to have thrown every idea he had at the time into it.
Chuck Bowen
December 04, 2014
Part of why this film works is the gentle glaze massaged into the black and white image. The soft effect powders the faces, without blemish: innocence blossoms. The camera moves gracefully, sometimes with much style, but never overdone.
Cuyler Ballenger
August 09, 2014
…A debut feature of extraordinary passion and vigor… Carax is trying to articulate thoughts and feelings all his own, and Boy Meets Girl never quite feels derivative; rather the overall impression is of a film lover working through his affections to get to the originality beneath them. Though it isn’t yet fully formed, a faint glimmer of genius is perceptible throughout.
Calum Marsh
August 05, 2014
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