Despite its dour title, Mauvais Sang (Bad Blood, 1986) is
a rapturous film, spilling over with director Leos Carax's enthusiasm for
the possibilities of cinema. Within that rapture, however, lies a deeply
French pessimism about the realities of life and love. This apparent
paradox--hope holding hopelessness--fills Mauvais Sang with a
litany of seeming contradictions (it's both grave and whimsical; both
romantic and cynical) that ultimately yield a film as physically
satisfying as a good cry. Sang's inherent sweetness is made all the
more bitter by the knowledge that Carax himself, 15 years and two films
later, seems to have forsaken hope as an artistic avenue and fully
embraced the rapture of despair.
Mauvais Sang tells the story of Alex (Denis Lavant), a simian
young card hustler who is coaxed into a heist after his father is
murdered. His father's partners, Marc and Hans, offer him $150,000 if he
can use his quick hands to steal the vaccine for "STBO," a retrovirus that
attacks couples who make love without passion. He reluctantly agrees,
dumping his doting young girlfriend Lise (Julie Delpy) and heading off to
the city for a life of crime. There, he meets and instantly falls for Anna
(Juliette Binoche), Marc's much younger lover. As they prepare for the
heist, Alex attempts to woo Anna, who is charmed but steadfast in her love
for the older, far more aloof Marc, whose health seems to be mysteriously
deteriorating (could it be STBO?). Anna's rejection, coupled with the
sudden reappearance of Lise, drives Alex to distraction, which causes a
severe injury to his hands, which in turn imperils the mission that
brought him there in the first place. The results are both predictably
tragic and unexpectedly uplifting.
Up to the moment when Alex meets Anna, the film is a study in implied
motion. Carax binds the actors in static positions and lets the camera
suggest movement (along the length of a phone cord, across a face in tight
close-up, amid the rapid shuffling of a deck of cards) within confined
space. Even Anna's first appearance--in the distorted mirror of a chugging
city bus--is stilled. But at the moment Alex falls for her, both film and
character bust loose. As the radio plays the stuttering guitar intro to
David Bowie's "Modern Love," Alex takes off sprinting down the fabricated
city streets and the camera dollies along, taking in the bursts of red
that flare behind him as he runs past endless gray walls in a fever. The
shot is long and exhilarating, a contemporary response to the traffic jam
from Godard's Weekend, and as perfect an evocation of love's first
blush as has ever been filmed. The Godard influence hardly ends there; the
entire sequence that follows is straight out of A Woman Is a Woman
(young Binoche had all the wonder of Anna Karina in 1961), redolent
with the same romantic fabulism, and tempered by the same air of impending
disappointment. At one point while on the phone to her, Alex tries to spy
Anna in the hotel across the street. The cord is too short, so he twists
around and leans backwards, suspended at a 45-degree angle, held only by
the phone wire. In the full tizzy of romance--both the characters' and the
filmmaker's--no contrivance is too ridiculous.
The giddiness of this prolonged (and ultimately unsuccessful) seduction
is balanced by scenes of sober formalism, peppered throughout with absurd
and poetic antiformal outbursts. Again, Carax's enthusiasm for the medium
is boundless. Given the conceit of the disease itself (a virus that knows
how you feel), it's clear that anything goes. And everything does. Whether
parachuting from an airplane, speeding down the road on motorcycles, or
locked in discussion, the characters are held in a relentlessly curious
frame, one that never fails to capture the quiet beauty of humans on the
eternal verge of closeness.
After Mauvais Sang, however, the hope surrounding Carax's
hopelessness would diminish to a point of imperceptibility, as his style
became more classical and his stories grew bleaker and bleaker. His next
film was the unremittingly grim Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (The
Lovers on the Bridge, 1991), which functions as a quasi-sequel to
Sang, reuniting Levant (again playing a guy named Alex, this time a
drug-addicted, suicidal homeless man) and Binoche (a nearly blind homeless
woman), who find a compromised variant of love among the concrete ruins of
the oldest bridge in Paris. Next came Pola X (1999), a morbid and
graphically sexual adaptation of Melville's Pierre, or the
Ambiguities, which posits that the only logical outcome of a life in
art is despair, dissolution, and death.
When asked where he'd gone for the eight years between Bridge
and Pola X, Carax tersely replied, "To hell." "No project," he
elaborated, "could counteract my disgust for cinema." Though both his
later films are beautiful, compelling works, they spill over with Carax's
professed disgust--not for cinema, but for the misery of life itself. In
their dark shadow, the infectious joy of Mauvais Sang becomes all
the more devastating.
From The
Stranger.com
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