Title: « It’s not me »: All about Leos Carax in forty minutes and some dust
Article:
Le filmmaker is taking a deep look at himself in a montage film where he freely expresses his sensory imagination.
The title sounds like a childish protest – we all know what that’s worth. It’s also a clever play on words, especially when the film claims to be autobiographical. Everything Carax, whether about himself or others, is encapsulated in this title, blending stubborn childhood, Dadaist defiance, and Rimbaud’s taste for incantation and mystery. It’s quite rare that the distributor Les Films du Losange offers us a chance to discover a forty-one-minute and nineteen-second film in which Carax – who did nothing to conform to the standard film length – creates a piece that is both illegitimate and finely crafted, openly intimate, bleeding and laughing at the same time in a typical Carax fashion.
To get a better understanding of what to expect, the artist’s background is dissected. Born in Suresnes (Hauts-de-Seine) to an American mother and Swiss father, under the more common name of Alex Dupont, sixty-three years ago. He has directed six feature films in thirty years since his career began in 1980 with a short film joyfully titled « Strangulation Blues. » From « Boy Meets Girl » in 1984 to « Annette » in 2021, including « The Lovers on the Bridge, » which almost bankrupted the French film industry in 1991, Carax illuminates his characters – lovers suffering from the paroxysmal pain of lovers – in the dark sun of melancholy, seeking in cinema the primitive light of eternal renewal.
The duo of Denis Lavant and Juliette Binoche accompanies him in this passion. She, for a shorter time than him, becomes the filmmaker’s alter ego on screen. Otherwise, the shadow of Jean-Luc Godard (1930-2022), another romantic, has loomed consciously over Leos Carax since his beginnings – it could be worse. Without blushing, he can claim to have taken up the torch of a cinema saturated with anxieties and beauties, never bowing to anyone or anything, and whose country is called the night. In his own way and with his own means, in a kind of grand mix that goes back to the spells of silent cinema, the insurgent radiance of childhood, and the starry lyricism of moving bodies. One would have to wake up early to find something more inspired.
A consummate art of contradictions
All this is enough to pique one’s interest in the forty minutes and some dust that are now being presented to the general public. It all starts, like in the Bible, with the genesis: a commission from the Centre Pompidou for a short film intended for an exhibition that never took place. The subject of the inquiry: « Where are you at, Leos Carax? » The artist’s response: a big green « shit » crossing a black screen and a cavernous voice off-screen – « If I knew… » – which seems to mimic the old model JLG. It couldn’t start any worse – or funnier – except that the film continues and sincerely attempts, as best it can, to answer that question.
To read the rest of the article, please subscribe to Le Monde.