It’s Not Me: Portrait Without a Mirror

C’est pas moi (It’s Not Me, 2024), the seventh feature of the French cult director Leos Carax, is arguably the most anomalous film in what can only be described as an eccentric career consisting of Carax’s celebrated breakthrough features Boy Meets Girl (1984) and Mauvais Sang (The Night is Young, 1986), the largely maligned Pola X (1999), the masterful work of neo-surrealism Holy Motors (2012), and his polarising collaboration with the Sparks brothers Annette (2021), not to mention the unchecked extravagance of Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (The Lovers on the Bridge, 1991) which was, at the time, reported to be the most expensive production in French film history. As Carax explains at the start of the film, It’s Not Me was conceived as the result of an invitation from France’s esteemed institute for contemporary and modern art, the Centre Pompidou, who asked him to respond “in pictures” to the question “Où en êtes-vous, Leos Carax?” (“Where are you, Leos Carax?”). While Carax did not submit something to the Pompidou, his thought-provoking and playful response to their question adopts the form of a filmic autoportrait: a subgenre of the essay film which takes the filmmaker and their oeuvre as both its subject and its object. However, far from a tribute to Classical portraiture’s objective of offering a ‘window to the soul’, Carax’s autoportrait is a portrait “seen from behind”; a portrait which, Carax explains, he “tried to make […] without any mirror”.¹

It’s Not Me uses the pre-text of portraiture to play an identity game through which Carax both performs for and shies away from the knowledge-hungry gaze of the public. Although, through voiceover, Carax quickly answers the Pompidou’s question with a blunt “Je ne sais pas” (“I don’t know”), his cinematic response takes the form of an elaborate montage composed of archival footage (from film history, Carax’s own films and historical footage), still images and on-screen text, as well as some original footage to which Carax frequently applies tacky post-production effects. As a cult figure of sorts, It’s Not Me exploits Carax’s reputation for obscurity, a term which simultaneously describes both Carax’s self-consciously zany persona and his reluctance to appear in public. Indeed, the name ‘Leos Carax’ is itself a pseudonym which the filmmaker – given the name Alex Dupont at birth – devised at the age of 13 by creating an anagram from his first name and the name Oscar. One senses that, 50 years later, Carax is still reinventing his own sense of self, with It’s Not Me conducting a cinematic experiment in appearance which could be said, in the language of French phenomenology, to entail both revelation and withdrawal.

Shortly into the film we see Carax, in his pyjamas and sunglasses, reading on his bed. Suddenly the image explodes into a hallucinogenic spectrum of saturated greens, blues and reds as Carax leans over to retrieve a cigarette from his bedstand and proceeds to light it. Achieving a near-identical ‘digital Fauvist’ effect to Jean-Luc Godard’s Éloge de l’amour (In Praise of Love, 2001), Carax makes use of the digital image’s potential for de-figuration and uncanny abstraction and likens himself to Godard in the same gesture, who was also rarely sighted in public without sunglasses. Indeed, Carax’s film can in many ways be seen as a tribute to Godard who set a precedent for the autoportrait genre when interrogating his own directorial legacy in the film JLG/JLG, Autoportrait en décembre (JLG/JLG, Self-Portrait in December, 1995). This reverential nod to the treasured auteur is further substantiated, without subtlety, through Carax’s use of colourful on-screen text which mimics the scriptural strategies of films like Tout va bien (1972) and the momentous Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998) while replacing Godard’s favoured tricolore with a new colour pallet, predominantly made up of greens and reds, that reflects the use of colour in his own films. In this respect, one could say that Carax appropriates Godard’s aesthetic in order to fabulate himself, filtering his own identity through that of another director (and not just any director).

As with Histoire(s) du cinéma – an idiosyncratic mosaic of film historical citations which Godard re-sequences into an histoire (history/story) about cinema’s failure to document the holocaust – Carax’s film also has an underlying political discourse that emerges as a result of the dialogue it stages between scripted and documentary cinemas. Echoing Godard, Nazism is central to Carax’s own political histoire, with historical and fictional representations of Hitler seemingly used as a reference point for the image of tyranny in the present: an allusion developed through a photo-montage of political figures who Carax credits in the end titles as “bastards”. Perhaps the most poignant moment of Carax’s film employs a different montage effect discovered long ago by Sergei Eisenstein, who championed the marriage of a-synchronous sound and the moving image in a manner which was designed to unite these two principal elements of cinema in a single cinematic idea. In an ode the vulnerable, It’s Not Me takes the heartbreaking footage of the young Syrian refugees Alan and Ghalib Kurdi, lying dead on the Turkish shoreline, and pairs them with the voice of Jonas Mekas who testifies, in his film Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1972), to a world full of “displaced persons”.

Despite It’s Not Me’s liberal use of references – to film history, to Godard and to the upheavals and injustices of the 20th and 21st centuries – it remains, in many ways, a personal film, fitting of the autoportrait label. Indeed, Carax is very much present throughout the film thanks to his raspy voice, traces of his private life (including images of his daughter and pets) and the insertion of sequences from his films at regular intervals. At times, there is a sense that Carax longs to dispense with the façade of the ‘cineaste’ and show us something real about what it means to make films for a living. Indeed, following the credits we see the titular marionette from Annette restage Denis Lavant’s legendary dance to David Bowie’s “Modern Love” in Mauvais Sang, but this time the hands and bodies of the puppeteers have not been elided by the editors. However, as Carax reminds us with the title of his film – which invokes Rimbaud’s adage “Je est un autre” (“I is another”) – what we may find beneath the façade is not the unadulterated, undivided presence of a self but always something or someone else…  

C’est pas moi/It’s Not Me (2024 France 41 mins)

Prod Co: CG Cinéma/Théo Films/Arte France Cinéma Prod: Charles Gillibert, Leos Carax Dir, Scr, Ed: Leos Carax Phot: Caroline Champetier Prod Des: Florian Sanson Cos Des: Pascaline Chavanne 

Cast: Leos Carax, Denis Lavant, Kateryna Yuspina, Nastya Golubeva Carax, Nastya Golubeva Carax, Bianca Maddaluno, Bianca Maddaluno, Petr Anevskii

Endnotes