Boy Meets Girl

I. “le look”

Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl. A tale as old as time, except that writer/director Leos Carax shuffles these familiar story elements and upends romantic expectations. His 1984 debut feature Boy Meets Girl can be considered part of the cinéma du look that emerged in 1980s France, defined by Guy Austin as “a style of film-making … characterised not by any collective ideology but rather an interest in fantasy rather than realism, a technical mastery of the medium, an intertextual tendency to cite from other films, and a spectacular visual style (le look).”¹ Ginette Vincendeau classifies it as: 

[A] French film genre, which arose with Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Diva in 1981, designating youth-orientated films with high production values. Subsequent titles include Beineix’s 37ͦ2 le matin/Betty Blue (1986), Luc Besson’s Subway (1985) and Nikita (1990), and Leos Carax’s Mauvais Sang/The Night is Young (1986) … The ‘look’ of the cinéma du look refers to the films’ high investment in non-naturalistic, self-conscious aesthetics, notably intense colours and lighting effects. Their spectacular (studio-based) and technically brilliant mise-en-scène is usually put to the service of romantic plots.² 

Austin defines the trio of Beineix, Besson and Carax as “New New Wave” filmmakers who were “bracketed as a movement because of a perceived similarity of visual style and, to a lesser extent, of subject matter (young lovers in urban or alienating surroundings).”³ Austin goes on to list: 

…the critiques of the cinéma du look: namely that it is superficial, and shows a complete absence of political and social concerns. Other common objections include attacks on the lack of plot and of psychological realism (the basis for the canon of ‘great’ French cinema from the thirties to the seventies). Comparisons to ‘inferior’ cultural forms like television, music video, advertising and the comic strip also abound.⁴ 

Austin proposes that aesthetics is a key element of this style/genre: 

Equating ‘authentic cinema’ with ideology, critics have tended to neglect the aesthetic importance of the cinéma du look. An important exception is Raphaël Bassan’s essay, ‘Trois néo-baroques français’, which appeared in La Revue du cinéma in 1989. Bassan welcomed the cinéma du look as a break with the ‘chronic naturalism’ of French cinema, and valued its synthesis of ‘high’ and ‘low’ art as well as its engagement with the problems of alienated protagonists who are outside any cosy familial structures.⁵

Austin wrote from the vantage point of the 1990s, but a 1980s perspective by Jill Forbes retroactively clarifies the “New New Wave” label: 

The bande à trois consisting of Besson, Beineix and now Carax, currently acclaimed as the ‘newest wave’ in French cinema, illustrates how strong the example of the old New Wave remains. This is a cinema about cinema about cinema, highly derivative and deliberately so, which most resembles both the cinema of two decades ago and the American cinema it refers to in its urbanity.⁶ 

What distinguishes Carax from Beineix and Besson? Forbes believes the answer lies with two nouvelle vague filmmakers: 

Carax most resembles his predecessors, both the pre-1968 [Jean-Luc] Godard and the early [François] Truffaut, in the area in which he is most unexpectedly original, namely the emotional intensity and anxiety that so evidently run through his films. Despite what some viewers have said about youth culture, Boy Meets Girl is less about how to be streetwise in the 1980s than about love – love writ large and without any of the irony the title implies.⁷

While the romance may be heartfelt, the world in which it takes place – in and around Paris – is viewed ironically. Vincendeau defines this contradiction, declaring that Boy Meets Girl “combined New Wave romanticism with post-modernism”⁸ 

II. “the tale of young love”

The plot of Boy Meets Girl is slim: The boy, Alex (Denis Lavant), and girl, Mireille (Mireille Perrier), have been left by their romantic partners, and end up alone at home and drifting around Paris. As Forbes admits: “Few moviegoers would attend to Carax’s films for their plot, towards which the director’s attitude is at best casual: if you must have it, let it be slender and preferably unoriginal. Boy Meets Girl is eponymously the tale of young love.”⁹ The stylistics synonymous with the cinéma du look immediately distinguishes the film: it is strikingly shot in monochrome, courtesy of cinematographer Jean-Yves Escoffier. It opens like a bedtime story, a starry wall and a closed door, with a voiceover by an apparently wizened narrator. This is a grim fairy tale, though, with the damaged characters of Alex and Mirielle lost among a sea of disconnected urbanites. 

Despite the melancholic love story, Boy Meets Girl has wit scribbled in its margins, including, but not limited to: twin men (Rémy Brozek and Georges Brozek) using a photocopier (in front of a mirror, no less); graphic descriptions of sex that are not shown (denying salacious expectations); an impromptu acrobatic forward flip over a subway ticket barrier (defying convention and gravity); a group of party guests standing immobile, most with their backs to camera, evoking the mannequin-like partygoers from L’Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad, Alain Resnais, 1961). As Chuck Bowen notes: 

Boy Meets Girl is in love with movies, and it conjures a movie world of inventively lo-fi density and dexterity. It’s also in love with textures and props and mysteries and anecdotes. This film could serve as the working definition of a sketchbook movie, as Carax appears to have thrown every idea he had at the time into it.¹⁰

While Boy Meets Girl is reminiscent of the nouvelle vague, the comparison to Last Year at Marienbad seems more apt, as Carson Lund explains: 

Both films are elusive romances told from the frustrated male perspective, both are situated within a hyper-extended microcosm of reality, or a hypnotic dream space with the appearance of the physical world, and both use a game (Nim in Marienbad, pinball in Boy Meets Girl) as an occasional metaphor for the ubiquity of chance in the progression of their characters.¹¹

Perhaps Alex and Mirielle are a lost next generation of nouvelle vague characters: if the lead couple of À bout de souffle (Breathless, Jean-Luc Godard, 1960) had settled down into the bourgeois life, this boy and girl could be their disaffected descendants. While Godard’s Masculin féminin (1966) concerned “The Children of Marx and Coca-Cola”, Boy Meets Girl shows the offspring of those children adrift, the philosophy of Marx diminished and usurped by the more superficial cola-covered ‘pop’ culture. It feels like Alex and Mirielle have somehow skipped to the end of the story, glimpsed their future and, with weary resignation, decided to embrace their fates in the present. 

The cinematic references in Boy Meets Girl run the gamut from silent film-like multiple exposures of faces in close up (like giants staring down from the heavens above the earthly characters) to Hitchcockian homage, the latter being a large window in Mirielle’s apartment, acting like a cinema screen on the world, its obvious antecedent being Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954). While the huge size of this window magnifies the voyeurism to overwhelm the viewer, the couple seen through this window is seemingly unaware or unconcerned that they are on full display to the world. Lund cites “the image of happy lovers in a window across the courtyard” as an example of where “the film acknowledges its own conceit of cinema as a duplication of reality as inherently flawed, while at the same time making it known that this striving for the ideal is nevertheless essential to living.”¹²

Strive as the characters might, though, the universe seems to be pitted against them, rendering their struggles futile, their hopes dashed. At the party, we see a US astronaut (Hans Meyer) gazing at the faraway moon – the surface upon which he once walked – like its presence is taunting him by being visible yet out of reach, and his pairing with a former Miss Universe (Lolo Pigalle) seems to underline the irony. Later, a desperate pinball player (Robert Benavente) is hectored by an electronic voice emitted from a pinball machine, as if taunted by a cruel god ruling over a universe that always wins. So it is with Alex and Mireille, two thwarted dreamers stranded in a cruel cosmos, who threaten to succumb to their negative impulses – Alex destructive, Mireille self-destructive – as a reaction against their predicament. 

III. “the dreamer director”

Bowen views Boy Meets Girl alongside two other early features from prominent filmmakers, those being Jean Luc-Godard and Jim Jarmusch respectively: 

Breathless and Stranger than Paradise … revel in the coolness of not giving a damn. Carax’s characters, however, assume these cool poses awkwardly and with little satisfaction, and their stumbling humanizes them and grounds the movie’s endless conceits down in tangibly earthly disappointment. When Mireille … cuts her hair short in place of a suicide attempt, she unmistakably resembles Jean Seberg, but with a far greater degree of emotional exposure: There’s an explicit element of desperate compensation to this gesture that transcends name-dropping.¹³

The performances of Lavant and Perrier are perfectly coordinated with Carax’s intentions. Perrier evokes silent cinema, her cropped hair inviting comparisons to Renée Jeanne Falconetti’s appearance in La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (The Passion of Joan of Arc, Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928), arguably the archetypal face of the tortured cinematic heroine, as well as the aforementioned Seberg in Breathless. Lavant is more prominent, both because the tale is told principally from Alex’s point of view and that the actor would go on to become a regular collaborator – and surrogate – for the director, as Indigo Bailey acknowledges: “Christened with Carax’s own birth name [Alex Christophe Dupont], the Alex of Boy Meets Girl serves as an expressionistic portrait of the dreamer-director – a solemn romantic who refuses to parse life from fantasy.”¹⁴

Lavant also recalls silent cinema, but the stillness of Perrier (even her most animated moment, the tap dance routine, feels tentative) stands in contrast to the motion of Lavant. As Bailey declares: “Not only a screen actor but an acrobat, a mime, and a devoted thespian, Lavant’s magic lies above all in his unrivalled elasticity.”¹⁵ Forbes defined the young Lavant in Boy Meets Girl and Mauvais Sang: “His face, which is gaunt, pock-marked with acne and with narrow, deep-set eyes, is the most compellingly melancholy since Jean-Louis Barrault, whom he resembles not as the youthful Baptiste [from Les Enfants du Paradis (Children of Paradise, Marcel Carné, 1945)] but as an old man. It is an old young face, constantly wearing greasepaint, the sad clown of legend destined never to be successful in love.”¹⁶

The lovelorn Alex is also a rootless character. Despite having a home, a hidden map of the city in his apartment is a record of his life outside. This type of wanderer is characteristic of Lavant in Carax’s films, being somnambulant and passionate – an unpredictable combination. As Bailey explains: “In his collaborations with Carax, we see Lavant wandering towards obscure destinations as if sleepwalking; or, in Holy Motors [2012], running to nowhere, on a treadmill in his motion-capture skinsuit. Elsewhere, Lavant propels into action when romantic desire is too lawless to be articulated, as in the explosive musical sequences of Mauvais sang or Les amants [Les Amants du Pont-Neuf, 1991]. In Lavant’s rebellious body, ‘unproductive’ spurts of action burst with vitality and mystique.”¹⁷ 

These “spurts of action” may be rooted in a romantic impulse with good intentions but they can also result in sudden acts of violence, lending Boy Meets Girl a dangerous edge. Comparing Carax to Besson, and especially Beineix, Christian Checa Bañuz notes that “whereas these filmmakers emphasise beauty in itself, in Carax’s cinema the sinister as its latent opposite threatens and, at the same time, reinforces the beautiful.”¹⁸ ‘Boy’ may meet ‘Girl’ in Boy Meets Girl, but the happy times are fleeting, the romance unrequited. Despite the sense of doom in this conclusion, the film is not cynical about this fact – it recognises it as a sad reality. Nevertheless, the film still places love front and centre, a core part of life to strive for.

Boy Meets Girl (1984 France 100 mins)

Prod Co: Abilène Prod: Patricia Moraz Dir: Léos Carax Scr: Léos Carax Phot: Jean-Yves Escoffier Ed: Nelly Meunier, Francine Sandberg Mus: Jacques Pinault

Cast: Denis Lavant, Mireille Perrier, Carroll Brooks, Élie Poicard, Maîté Nahyr

Endnotes