Mauvais Sang

Alexandre Christophe Dupont is one of the most elusive major figures in contemporary cinema. This is quite fitting, given the slippery, intoxicating effervescence of his work. Far better known by his nom de plume, Leos Carax (an anagram for Alex Oscar), he started out as a critic like many French filmmakers before him including Marcel Carnè, François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, and Jean-Luc Godard. A staff writer at Cahiers du Cinéma at 20, Carax transitioned into feature films aged 23, and cites Godard’s films as an abiding influence. For Fergus Daly and Garin Dowd, Godard and Carax are united by “The simultaneous search for the beautiful image and its critique, a tension between images of frozen eternity and temporal decay.”¹

Mauvais Sang

Carax’s second feature, Mauvais Sang (1986), is shot mainly in bold primary colours by cinematographer Jean-Yves Escoffier, who also lensed Carax’s luminously monochrome debut Boy Meets Girl (1984). A marked advance on that first feature, the film is vaguely futuristic and remarkably unrhetorical. It does not try to persuade in the didactic vein of TV commercials, political ads, or even a typical Sam Fuller movie. If anything, the film seems to postulate a genuine and unforced belief in simultaneously giddy and painfully sublime romantic love. In that respect, Mauvais Sang harks back to two much simpler but crowd-pleasing youth-oriented tragedies of the late 1960s, Elvira Madigan (Bo Widerberg, 1967) and Romeo and Juliet (Franco Zeffirelli, 1968). Mauvais Sang, however, has a bottomless audiovisual poetry and fairytale quality all its own that seems closer to La Belle et la Bête (Beauty and the Beast, Jean Cocteau, 1946). One particularly unsavoury character even remarks in the film: “Cocteau is dead”. In a very direct sense, it seems that the hugely ambitious Carax is slyly commenting on his own art in this scene. Not only do Cocteau and Carax share an extraordinarily heightened awareness of mise-en-scène and an affinity for magic, but Carax announces his arrival as an heir and reviver of the former’s abiding artistic concerns. 

Carax’s highly evolved style has been influenced by and exerted influence on advertising, high fashion and music videos, while blending fine art into the mix. His films, along with those of two other emerging filmmakers working in roughly the same mode – Jean-Jacques Beneix and Luc Besson – “broke the chronic naturalism in French cinema.”² In a retrospective 1989 article published in La Revue du Cinéma, critic Rapahël Basan subsumed these directors under Cinéma du Look, citing Beneix’s Diva (1981) as the earliest example which, indicative of a general zeitgeist, premiered a few months before the first MTV broadcast.³ These filmmakers emerged out of what Daly and Dowd call “the proliferating image reservoir of the mid-1980s,”⁴ and so did the young audiences initially most receptive to their work. Filmmakers and audiences alike were beginning to be informed audio-visually by the effects of bourgeoning electronic information systems, specifically what media sociologist Joshua Meyrowitz first described in 1985 (a year before Mauvais Sang premiered) as “the media content loop”.⁵

Mauvais Sang

Bassan, Daly and Dowd describe the Cinéma du Look filmmakers as working in a Neo-baroque idiom. Yet the French symbolists and decadents of the late 19th century, like Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon, are a much closer, and indeed more specifically French, comparison from art history than 17th century baroque – a heavy, predominately Roman period-style. Hugh Honour and John Fleming explain: “In their partial rejection of naturalism and impressionism, symbolists turned towards worlds of imagination, solipsism and fantasy.”⁶ Daly and Dowd, perhaps unwittingly, see Carax’s early work in exactly this light, arguing that his first two films “do not present […] as [Carax’s] critics claim, a narcissistic trail of indulgent imagery, but rather the world or image-universe as its own subjectivity.”⁷ Art historian Justine Hopkins, when writing about symbolism on the other hand, parallels the harsher critics of Cinéma du Look: “The symbolists did not create a new style […] Although their works can appear cliched and tasteless […] their art represents a vital strand in modernist aesthetics.”⁸ John Christian elaborates:

Above all, symbolism can be seen as an extension of the Romantic movement. […] The old subjects, if not exactly abandoned […] were certainly seen in new ways […] Others went further conquering fresh fields of imagination, or, at worst, descending into exhibitionism, the most tedious aspects of the movement.⁹

But surely a cinema without exhibitionism is as unthinkable as a cinema without scopophilia? Carax has, to a greater extent than Luc Besson, unquestionably conquered “fresh fields of imagination.” He has also extended the existentialist credo of auteurism, wherein “style is both fashion and metaphysics.”¹⁰ Carax’s vision of the world goes far deeper than general default idea of the film director as star, which Caryn James described as “born out of a marriage between auteurism and the media-mad culture of celebrity.”¹¹

The literal English translation of Mauvais Sang is Bad Blood. This alludes not only to the serum that is both the MacGuffin and the metaphor on which the poeticised story hinges, but shares its title with a segment of the autobiographical prose poem Une saison enfer (A Season in Hell, 1873) – the magnum opus of the impossibly precocious French enfant terrible and trailblazing symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891). Bursting with wild emotion and feverish imagery, Une saison enfer is about, among other things, Rimbaud’s torrid love affair with fellow poet Paul Verlaine.

This parallel speaks volumes of Carax’s grand ambitions as an iconoclast with one eye on posterity, and it is not far-fetched to stress a particular affinity between these two boy-wonders. Jeremy Harding and John Sturrock speak of “Rimbaud’s distaste for the idea that the poet’s task might simply consist of the workaday tinkering with the steady flow of information through the senses.”¹² Similarly, poetic ambiguity takes precedence over narrative prose in Carax’s films. Christian Checa Bañus concurs:

Carax’s first two films are poetry: the shots answer to emotional impulses and not narrative concerns; there are cracks in the image that the spectator has to fill; images participate equally from light and darkness, they are as tender as they are sinister. Compositions in Mauvais sang reach a tremendous level of abstraction, inspired by avant-garde painting of the 20th century (particularly Nicolas de Staël, the painter Godard admired the most), with a sometimes extreme spatial order which defies the laws of gravity. Where is the floor? Where is the ceiling? It is as if we were traveling on a comet, in a world different from our own.¹³  

The filmic influences on Carax’s work warrant comment. Placing Mauvais Sang in the media-specific context of French film noir, the francophone and Francophile British writer Robin Buss  was puzzled: Mauvais Sang “is an undeniably stylish sci-fi thriller, with some enchanting colour photography and a general air of youthful enthusiasm, but with a plot so complex, and so obliquely told, that it leaves the impression of having no content at all.”¹⁴ This can only be called mind-bogglingly literal-minded, and a bizarre rebuke against the tradition of film noir as a whole. This is particularly true given Paul Schrader’s assertion that “film noir is not a genre […] it is not defined, as are the western and gangster genres, by conventions of setting and conflict, but rather by the more subtle qualities of tone and mood”¹⁵ – and Mauvais Sang is certainly a mood piece above all. Like the majority of films noirs, it is also a crime story, despite the narrative obliqueness and surfeit of style that left Buss a perplexed spectator. 

Mauvais Sang

The story of Mauvais Sang is instantly recognisable to fans of hard-boiled fiction everywhere, if admittedly often conveyed through off-centre, bisected extreme close-ups, bewitching images of reflective surfaces, anti-naturalistic lighting and accented audio-cues. The plot elements are gloriously pulpy. The film takes place over two sweltering weeks, while the celestial phenomenon of Halley’s comet adds both a cosmic and a time-specific dimension. (Halley’s comet last appeared in the inner solar system in March 1986.) Sonically, Carax’s mesmerising depictions of largely nocturnal, rather depopulated cityscapes are usually toned down to a whisper. Though Buss did not exactly approve, even he found the love story touching.¹⁶ I find it delightful.

In his second starring role for Carax, Denis Lavant plays the once famously taciturn Alex, a young ventriloquist and card sharp with lightning-quick hands, ideally suited for daring larceny. He is full of charming magic tricks and used to go under the ironic moniker “chatterbox”. His estranged, recently deceased father, Jean (never seen clearly, but in the morgue as the story proper begins), used to work with a pair of insignificant, aging crooks Marc (Michel Piccoli) and Hans (Hans Meyer) who are pressured into an ill-fated caper to steal a serum against a virus that kills young people who have sex without love from the offices of the shady big-pharma company Darley-Wilkinson. A self-evident AIDS-metaphor from a time when HIV was still terrifying, coupled with a reference to D.W. Griffith – the so-called father of cinema, and the director of the first real gangster movie, The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912). Their employer is a mysterious and powerful elderly American lady (Carroll Brooks), once Jean’s lover and clearly several rungs higher up the criminal ladder. Naturally, Alex becomes embroiled in the crime. And naturally he, despite already having a loving girlfriend, Lise (Julie Delpy), falls for Marc’s young lover, Anna (Juliette Binoche).

Lavant is as central to Carax’s work as Mifune Toshiro was to that of Kurosawa Akira, and as nimble and acrobatic as a young Cary Grant or Burt Lancaster – with a dash of Gene Kelly, should a dazzlingly graceful musical set-piece so require, as it does in this  film, to the strains of David Bowie’s “Modern Love”. For pure cinematic elation, this scene is surpassed only by the ecstatic final shot – of an actual ascent – an apotheosis of the romance of movies.

Mauvais Sang

The Cinéma du Look filmmakers were always accused of blending low culture with high culture, of elevating style over substance and spectacle over narrative – or, perhaps more precisely – surface over depth. However, Raphaël Bassan himself was far more measured than many secondary commentators assume. He rallied on behalf of these filmmakers against other, harsher detractors: 

Critics, unable or unwilling to revitalise their discourses, and believing that a ‘film with a message’ is superior to a highly visual work, have lost some of their influence faced with the multiplicity of printed and recorded images. […] Beineix, Besson and Carax have grown up in a world where ads and clips are everywhere. They were amazed by this non-verbal way of expressing things, and have used it, although only moderately, given that their films all have, whatever people might think, a classical narrative framework. They have not attempted to ‘sell’ anything in the usual sense of the word.¹⁷  

Bassan’s mention of a classical narrative framework remains key to understanding why Mauvais Sang is still a great audience picture, 40 years later. I must concur with philosopher Noël Carroll: “For it is the movies, and not the modernist masterpieces or medical instruction films, that have captured the twentieth-century imagination.”¹⁸ That the audio-visually astute swankiness of Cinéma du Look feels innocent today in the light of AI-generated images and internet algorithms is, as they say, another story.

Mauvais Sang (1986 France 119 mins)

Prod. Co: Les Films Plainchant/Soprofilms/FR3 Prod: Denis Chateau, Alain Dahan, Philippe Diaz Dir, Scr: Leos Carax Phot: Jean-Yves Escoffier Ed: Nelly Quettier Prod des:Michel Vandestien with Thomas Peckre & Jack Dubus Mus: Benjamin Britten, Sergei Prokofiev, David Bowie

Cast: Denis Lavant, Julie Delpy, Juliette Binoche, Michel Piccoli, Hans Meyer, Carroll Brooks, Serge Reggiani

Endnotes