Leos Carax's Mauvais sang | Bad Blood | The Night Is Young (1986)

 

In 2012 the influential cultural magazine Les Inrockuptibles published an article by Jean-Marc Lalanne suggesting that Jean Eustache's La Maman et la putain (1973) is the film of the 70s, Arnaud Desplechin's Comment je me suis disputé… (ma vie sexuelle) the film of the 90s, and Charles Honoré's Les Chansons d'amour the film of the 2000s. Leos Carax's Mauvais sang (1986) it named as the film of the 80s. Some critics have gone so far as to call it one of French cinema's most important films.

Carax's second feature, Mauvais sang is the second of 'the Alex trilogy', and like the other two films is well within the range of the 'cinéma du look' obsessions: the subway shot early on in the film (surely a homage to Chantal Akerman's News from Home (1977); a marginal main character (Alex); a number of unforgettable and highly visual scenes, such as the funambulesque running and somersaulting sequence to David Bowie's 'Modern Love', and the 'magical' tricks made by Alex to his would-be lover.

The title Mauvais sang – literally 'Bad Blood' but unbelievably stupidly also translated as The Night Is Young – is partly a reference to the title of Rimbaud's second poem in his collection Une saison en enfer (1873): Alex is a Rimbaldian, rebellious character who espouses laziness, the lack of conventional work, but loves cultural pursuits, the arbitrariness of life, etc. And the title is also a reference to AIDS, here fictionally named STBO, which 'affects couples who make love without being in love'.

Alex, in this second view of him, is no longer as aspiring screenplay writer but a magician, a juggler, an acrobat, an (illegal) bonneteau trickster, and so on. Two ageing crooks, Marc (Michel Piccoli) and Hans (Hans Meyer) are threatened to cough up the cash by a usurer nicknamed L'Américaine (Carroll Brooks), and as Alex's father is dead they now turn to his son to steal the vaccine for STBO. Alex leaves his lover Lise (Julie Delpy) and falls straight into an impossible love: he meets Anna (a young Juliette Binoche) who is faithfully – and perhaps a little unbelievably – very much in love with the much older Marc.

This film is a visual and aural feast.