Leos Carax's Annette (2021)

It's easy to give a brief synopsis of Leos Carax's latest film Annette, which is in fact in English. Henry McHenry (Adam Driver) is a famous stand-up comedian with distinct echoes of Lenny Bruce*, whereas Ann Defrasnoux (Marion Cotillard) – the woman who'll shortly become his wife – is a famous opera singer. They have a child called Annette. As Henry loses his popularity he becomes jealous of Ann and takes to drink. To try to patch things up they go for a sailng holiday, but Henry gets drunk during a storm, tries to dance with Ann, and she falls overboard and drowns in the tussle. Henry saves Annette, they escape to shore, and there is no suspicion of foul play. Then Henry learns that Baby Annette can sing (wordlessly) and with the accompanist (Simon Helberg) they set about having her give huge performances to tumultuous reception. But then the accompanist tells Henry that he had an affair with Ann just before she formed a relationship with him and Annette might be his child: in a drunken rage Henry drowns him in the pool. But Annette has seen the murder, and in her final 'performance' all she can voice is 'Daddy...Daddy kills people.' So Henry is jailed.

There are many ellipses in the above paragraph, which in no way mentions the weirdness of the film, in which most of the dialogue is sung,  with the story and lyrics mainly written by Ron and Russell Mael of the band Sparks: the brothers appear in the film, as does Carax himself at the beginning. And Annette is in fact a puppet who only appears as a human being at the end, when she visits Henry in prison. Several snatches from (performed) television broadcasts are seen, including one Ann dreams in which his former girlfriends accuse him of abuse. As the paparazzi hound the couple around the world, the toll this takes on a relationship can be felt. Is this movie a take on appearance and reality and the brittleness of fame, a criticism of the cult of celebrity, or all three and more? Whatever the unanswerable question, this is an electrifying spectacle.

*Henry's onstage behaviour is self-destructive, partly autobiographical, uses strong language, and for those who've seen Bob Fosse's Lenny will recognise familiarites between Dustin Hoffman and Adam Driver. 

Leos Carax's Les Amants du Pont-Neuf | The Lovers on the Bridge (1991)

Leos Carax's film took five years in the making, and although the bridge here in Paris was closed for repair at the time, Carax was forced at one point to reconstruct it in Lansargues, Hérault . More than anything, I saw this film as the quintessence of the expression 'le cinéma du look' which has been used to describe the early films made by Jean-Jacques Beineix, Luc Besson and Carax: the fireworks, the speedboat, the fire-eating, etc. After Boy Meets Girl (1984) and Mauvais sang (1986), this is the final part of the 'Alex trilogy' (Alex being Carax's original first name), and Denis Levant being a kind of alter ego to Carax.

Alex is an SDF ('sans domicile fixe'), living in one of the alcoves on the closed Pont-Neuf along with the older Hans (Klaus Michael Grüber), who provides him with the drug Alcyon, a powerful sleeping draft. Money comes from Alex giving fire-eating shows to the tourists, and from stealing. And then along comes Michèle (Juliette Binoche), who is going blind, has a cat, sketches, and has been thrown out of her home by her boyfriend.

Alex learns this not by asking Michèle about her past, but indirectly by looking at a letter with her former address, visiting it, and reading her diary. Although Hans (with his own tragic backstory) is against this intruder, Alex and Michèle slowly fall in love and make money by sending wealthy café terrasse customers asleep by contriving to pour Alycon into their drinks and taking their wallets.

Although the plot gets somewhat lost in the literal and figurative fireworks and is impossible to believe, I can't see how anyone can truly dislike this film: certainly it's unforgettable. It would have us believe the unbelievable: that Alex can stun a cop and escape along the Seine in his speedboat, Michèle water-skiing behind; that a whole string of wanted posters (asking for information on Michèle because a cure for her eye disease has been found) would be plastered on walls of all advertising spots in the métro; that Michèle and Hans could enter the Louvre using an old key!; that Michèle can escape from shooting her partner through the skull; that the couple can survive the cold by Alex throwing them into the Seine in the middle of a chilly winter; and that a passing boat, with only an elderly couple on board would come passing by and agree to let them join them all the way on their final voyage. What the hell does that matter: this is 'le cinéma du look', and this is a hell of a film.

Leos Carax's Holy Motors (2012)

The world's a stage. Leos Carax himself appears in Holy Motors in a more-than-Hitchcockian cameo as he enters a door in a wall made to look like trees and we find ourselves in a movie theatre: from the beginning the illusion of reality is broken, appearance is revealed as a sham, as it will again and again with the Chinese boxes of this film which on occasion refers to other films, as indeed it refers to itself as a film.

And at the beginning we also see a few moving shots by the inventor of chronophotography, Etienne-Jules Marey, from which we see the recreation of movement. Brought up to present day, this film – and film of course is playing with reality – shows Mr Oscar (Denis Levant) playing with reality by acting out ten other characters, changing into them in a huge stretch limo which has a changing room and is driven by his chauffeuse Céline (Édith Scob), who sometimes announces to him when it's time to play his next role, for which Mr Oscar appears to be commissioned. The back of the limo serves as his dressing room, where he changes costumes, changes makeup, changes his age and on the second occasion superficially changes his sex. The titles I give him are taken from the beginning of the credit list at the end of the film, and are in chronological order:

Le Banquier. Not needing to change clothes as he talks on the phone, Mr Oscar (another reference to films) talks about bank details as Céline drives him to his second 'rendez-vous'.

La Mendiante. This is where Mr Oscar begs on the Pont Alexandre III dressed as a Romani beggar woman with a shawl round him.

L'O.S. de la Motion Capture. O.S. is an abbreviation of 'ouvrier spécialisé', and here we see Mr Oscar cavort, is dance the right word?, and join with a female in a vaguely sexual way.

M. Merde. Monsieur Merde, the one-eyed anarchist – already met in Carax's contribution to Tokyo ! (2008) –  inhabits the sewer and comes out to eats flowers and pester people, such as when he causes havoc to a film shoot in Père Lachaise. Interest is shown in incorporating Merde into the shoot, but he kidnaps Kay (Eve Mendes) and takes her into the sewers with him, although she seems completely unconcerned, indicating that she knows this is just a film. And, contrary to expectations, Merde covers her up as a Muslim woman (even the face, apart from the eyes), strips naked with an improbable permanent erection but does nothing.

L'Accordéoniste. Mr Oscar leads as accordionist in a church, followed by a number of other players.

Le Pére. Mr Oscar is a father talking to his daughter Angéle (Jeanne Disson), who's just been to a party. Kylie Minogue is heard singing 'Can't Get You Out of My Head' in the background. Angéle says she's had a great evening at first, although she's lying (like films are lying, like, oh...) and has just spent the time in the bathroom, and Mr Oscar rebukes her lack of confidence and tells her she'll have to live with herself as punishment.

Le Tueur. For reasons unknown, Mr Oscar is called upon to kill Théo. He visits the warehouse where he is and cuts him in the jugualar with a knife and then proceeds to make Théo look like just like he looks. But while he's doing this Théo partly revives and stabs Mr Oscar in the same way, and then dies. Mr Oscar too is obviously dying and staggers towards the limo, but Céline drags him there and he recovers without a scratch to his dressing room: of course, because his knifing was an illusion that Céline wanted to prolong to the end.

Le Tué. From killer to killed (or not). After being visited by a heavily disguised Michel Piccoli (but we'll skip that one) Mr Oscar shoots  dead someone much the same as himself outside Le Fouquet's, then is himself killed by the person's bodyguards. Céline interrupts and takes him back to the limo where he recovers completely. 

Le Mourant. Mr Oscar is dressed as a rich, dying old man and is joined by his niece Léa (Élise Lhomeau), and in this story there's a talk of life and death similar to Jane Campion's The Portrait of a Lady, Oscar (as M Vogan) breathes his last breath, gets up, thanks Léa and goes back to the limo.

(Before his last rendez-vous/performance Mr Oscar meets a female actor (Kylie Minogue) with whom he's had a relationship, and they go up the deserted La Samaritaine, which was once a department store. Kylie – who looks perhaps a little like Patricia (Jean Seberg) in Godard's À bout de souffle – then breaks into song like Marianne (Anna Karina) in Godard's Pierrot le fou. She then, with her partner who's just joined her, jumps to her death. Mr Oscar squeals at the suicide act, rejoins the limo and moves to his final appointment. We know that the suicides were in Carax's film, but were they also intended as fantasies within the film?)

L'Homme au Foyer. Céline drops him off, gives him his money for the day, drives off and Mr Oscar rejoins his family home with his wife and two daughters. We only see him with two chimpanzees.

As an epilogue Céline takes the car back to the depot, 'Holy Motors', and puts on the same mask that she, Édith Scob (as Christiane) wore in 1960 in Georges Franju's Yeux sans visage: yes, that's not an error. And then the motors talk amongst themselves about their lot. Disneyfication?

A major film in the history of cinema.

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.

Leos Carax's Boy Meets Girl (1984)

 

Along with Luc Besson and Jean-Jacques Beneix, Leos Carax has been labelled a creator of 'le cinéma du look', one of the significant features of which is spectacle: in the case of Carax we inevitably think of the fireworks seen from the reconstructed bridge in Les Amants du Pont-Neuf. Other features of 'le cinéma du look' are marginals, young people without a job who are shown on the métro: this is certainly true of Boy Meets Girl, the title itself being ironic in suggesting happiness at the same time of course as it is a nod to the importance of American English.

Ageing is a central problem, and Alex (Denis Lavant), Carax's film alter ego,* feels that in his early twenties he's outlived himself; he collects a list of firsts which he adds to a sheet of paper on his bedroom wall. At a party full of strange people, a group mention their ages, Bouriana saying at 37 he's achieved nothing. Later, Mireille mumbles the words of a classic Barbara song about the deleterious effects of time, although she presumably omits the title – which is also the first line of the chorus, 'Quand reviendras-tu ?' – because she clearly doesn't want Bernard to return.

This is a world where nothing is, or rather nothing seems, real. David Bowie sings 'When I Live My Dream', a medieval fantasy world of living in a castle and slaying dragons. A couple of lovers kissing on the Pont-Neuf seems so artifical that Alex throws coins at their feet in a cynical way of saying he's enjoyed the performance. And then we remember the earlier scene of Maite (Maïté Nahyr) leaving Henri and driving her child to the mountains in a car which has skis and sticks protruding through the windscreen, etc.

And everyone is either breaking up or having relationship problems: one of the early shots with Jo Lemaire & Flouze playing Serge Gainsbourg's break-up song, 'Je suis venu(e) te dire que je m'en vais'; Florence is having a relationship with Thomas, now the former boyfriend of Alex; Mirielle (Mireille Perrier) has split up with Bernard; Alex has to bang on the wall to silence his neighbours' argument; in a voiceover, a couple talk about their problems with oral sex.

Chance or coincidences are important, as in Bernard dropping the card inviting he and Mireille to the party; turning the radio dial to find the Dead Kennedy's playing 'Holiday in Cambodia'; Alex finding Mireille's details on a card at the party; Bouriana being both at the party and the café.

The suicide of Mireille comes almost as an inevitability, the dark blackness of the blood seeping onto her white dress as Bernard unwittingly pushes Mireille onto the scissors she's opened in readiness.

There are echoes of Strangulation Blues: Alex trying to strangle Thomas as Paul half-heartedly (or in a dream?) tries to strangle Colette, Alex trying to write a film, and the evocative black and white photography by Jean-Yves Escoffier . After her haircut Mireille also looks a little like Jean Seberg in À bout de souffle, as Colette did in Strangulation Blues.

*As I mentioned in another post, Alex Dupont became Leos Carax, an anagram of 'Alex' and 'Oscar'.

Leos Carax's Merde (1980)

 

The 38-minute Merde is one of a trilogy of films which came out in 2008, creating a feature length one under the name Tokyo!, as all three are set in that city. Perhaps the main theme linking them is that they are all outsiders. The other contributors are Michel Gondry and Bong Joon-ho.

A wild-eyed man (possibly half-blind) emerges from a sewer via a man-hole cover in central Toyko, walks oddly, snatches a cigarette, a wallet (from which he takes a note, eats it and discards the rest, licks a young girl's arm, then disappears back down his cover and into the sewer, where he sleeps. Television is full of the story.

The following day he re-emerges from his cover, releases several salvos of an explosive device and kills a number of people at random. When the police find him naked in his sewer that night, they arrrest him and he risks capital punishment by hanging. Me (Maître) Voland (Jean-François Balmer) defends him, and he has a similar beard, a similar eye complaint, and also speaks the language of the man. And the man (Carax's acteur fétiche Denis Lavant) gives his name as Merde, so he becomes M. Merde. Merde hates the Japanese, hates everything in fact, but this nihilist serial killer oddly falls into two categories with the Japanese: those who want him to be executed, and those who are in his favour.

Merde is hanged, pronounced dead, although he appears to come back to life, escapes from his noose, and disappears.

Leos Carax's Strangulation blues (1980)

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.