Critics reviews

During this nocturne, there are shots of Binoche clothed in a bright blue robe, which last as long as Lavant’s more famous run/dance, her eyes continually wide, her face flickering. This nighttime exchange between Alex and Anna, which flirts with comedy, tragedy, romance, disgust, pain, and love, is as perhaps as close to a mission statement for his films that Carax has yet offered and as romantic as movies get.

A masterpiece of ecstatic cinema from 1986, directed by Leos Carax at the age of twenty-five... With an emotional world akin to that of the New Wave masters, a visual vocabulary that pays tribute to their later works, and a visionary sensibility that owes much to Jean Cocteau's fantasies, Carax suggests the burden of young genius in a world of mighty patriarchs who aren't budging.

Not only is Carax's poetic impulse uninhibited, the poetry itself is totally unfettered from a dominant system. Mauvais sang's sense of symbolism is Cubist. Dozens of discrete signs and motifs stack, overlap, recombine, adhere, toppling over each other. It's exhilarating—and not only for the audience: watch Alex/Lavant/Carax careening down the street, frenzied with desire for his partner-in-crime's young lover, Anna (Binoche, flirty and unselfconscious like the Anna Karina her bob cut cites).

Generally, the film plays its stylish exterior against itself, exposing the hollow technical skill of Carax's nominal peers as being a corrosive element of cinema that can contain rich reservoirs of character but rarely does. Mauvais Sang dazzles with its imagery, but it's also one of the most humanistic works of a decade that could have used more of them.

If you think of the great works of French movie romanticism... you'll find they're linked not by any style of filmmaking. Rather, the lovers, whether because of youth or class or criminal impulses, all lie outside of mainstream respectability... In some ways, Carax's career has been a struggle to keep believing in that kind of romanticism when the difficulties of life or work intervene. Mauvais sang is its purest expression.

Carax is more of a poet than a prose writer and the jumpiness of his vision is such that the film often reaches the senses before the mind, with its images speaking most immediately through its expressionistic flourishes. The easiest way to find entry into Mauvais Sang is simply to appreciate its jagged, colorful surfaces, its shimmering beauty and flashes of self-conscious lyricism, to accede to its reveries, even if they only temporarily make sense, and to welcome and possibly celebrate its shifting tones and techniques.

Perhaps the most soaring, touching moment in last year's Holy Motors — a movie steeped in melancholy yet gloriously alive — occurs when Kylie Minogue's character sings, "Who were we/When we were/Who we were/Back then?" The answer to this question from Leos Carax's fifth film is discovered while watching his second, Mauvais Sang (1986), a salute, at once moody and ebullient, to the cinema of the past and the ferocious intensity of youth.

This is a film beyond story, one characterized by an infatuation with the medium itself: the edit, the close-up, the camera angle, movement, colors. Carax uses these tools to vivaciously celebrate cinema, as well as Lavant and Binoche (who he was romantically involved with), and his love for both is infectious. For the filmmaker, love is the reason for life...

The film is almost single-mindedly focused on cinema's capacity to render affect with an immediacy and sensuality possible only through montage—a kind of thinking with the camera that harkens back to the silent era, whose aesthetics the film directly references during a non-sequitur sequence with inaudible dialogue and optically printed footage.

After watching the former street performer Levant, bursting with romantic fervor, run down to the street and execute a cartwheel with Gene Kelly–worthy grace to "Modern Love," you will never think of the Bowie song the same way again. (Just ask Noah Baumbach, who paid explicit homage to the scene in Frances Ha.) This is film-drunkeness at its most inebriated.

From the spectator's point of view, the experience of the film is not at all incoherent, neither in form nor in content – aspects that, on the other hand, are not so delimited in Carax's work. The overall sense of Mauvais sang is not at all uncomfortable, it holds a musical coherence...

It's the images, as cinéastes like to call them, that drive Mr. Carax. Some are stunners, in particular a dizzying rescue by parachute. It's so exciting and has so little to do with the plot that you can't help suspecting the characters were sent up in the plane solely so the photographer, Jean-Yves Escoffier, could do his stuff... Mr. Carax makes much of speed and dramatic plays of light. But while the screen flashes and flickers, little else is happening.