Leos Carax is the pseudonym of Alex Dupont, and an anagram of 'Alex' and 'Oscar'. Strangulation Blues (Carax tends to go in for English titles) is his first short and it won first prize for a short at the Hyères festival in 1981 and paved the way for his first feature, Boy Meets Girl, in 1984. Carax had originally begun filming a film to be called La Fille Rêvée, which failed to see the light of day because a projector exploded and led to a fire in the Chinese restaurant where a scene was being filmed.
The film is in black and white and in some respects resembles the days before the talkies, in others the Nouvelle Vague cinema. Paul (Erik Frey), a hopeful film writer, returns to Colette (Anne Petit-Lagrange), who looks a little like Jean Seberg in À bout de souffle when she's asleep. She has in way inspired Paul in his writing and the tension between the two is palpable.
Paul thinks he's strangled Colette while she's sleeping, or maybe he dreamed it, but he escapes in the car. Meanwhile Colette wakes up. Several critics have seen in this short a number of aspects of Carax's future cinema.
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