Mauvais Sang dvd movie.|
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List Price: $24.98 Features • Color • DVD-Video • Full Screen • Subtitled • Widescreen • NTSC In Theaters : 1986 DVD Release : 10 April, 2001 |
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| ♥♥♥♥♥ | Enjoyable, nonsensical, selfish romanticism. |
| There's no way to make sense of "Bad Blood." Leos Carax's second and most successful film is basically a sequence of cinematic devices taken from French noir and gangster films. Plot is irrelevant.
If you read a summary of the film before you see it, you will most likely believe that the film is about an epidemic of a fictional disease, which is spread when two sexual partners don't truly love each other. In reality, the disease is briefly mentioned in the film, and sets up a certain plot point, but that's all. It does not figure in the dialogue beyond a couple of lines. It's a plot device, used once and then forgotten. And most of the film is like that. What is the film about? Well, there's this surly young man named Alex, and a very pretty girl who is inexplicably in love with him. But Alex loves this other girl (also pretty), you see, so he runs away to pursue her. But the second girl hangs out with two cool old gangsters who for some reason are in trouble with their crime syndicate. Then there's a whole bunch of plot devices that don't really matter, and guns and a car chase. So it's an action movie, then? Well, no. Actually, the film moves slowly, in the style of classic French noir. Like in "Breathless" or "Bob Le Flambeur" (both of which Carax must have watched a thousand times), there's a long build-up to a violent, but very short denouement which happens kind of arbitrarily. Action is irrelevant. Then what is the film about? Well, mostly it's about the faces of the actors. Most of the film takes place in the cool old gangsters' hideout where Alex likes to hang out. He sits around feeling totally bummed, because the second pretty girl is already in love with one of the cool old gangsters. Carax's camera shows his surly face, and the girl's pretty face, and the gangsters' faces. The characters engage in conversation, but conversation, like plot, is irrelevant. The dialogue is more like a combination of monologues, long, wordy, and vague. Everybody gazes vacantly into space and talks, seemingly to themselves. Carax hadn't yet discovered the terse style he would use for the dialogue in his third and most famous film, "Lovers On The Bridge." Realism is irrelevant. But that's what Carax's films are like. They are about sensation, not content. So, at one point, Alex runs down the street, jumping and performing cartwheels, while the camera follows and a David Bowie song plays in the background. Why does he do this? Who cares? The exuberance of the moment is all that matters. Same with the guns and car chases. Carax wants to raise the viewer's adrenaline through motion or suspense. He makes up the story as he goes along. And he concentrates on the faces, which are the only reason to watch this film. Despite the bad writing and the incoherence of the plot, Carax picked actors with expressive faces. The cool old gangsters look experienced and understanding. They've seen it all. They can relax when they plan a heist, because they know how everything works. One is a stern father-figure type, the other is like the laid-back, patient uncle. It's easy to like them. The girls are also great. Of all Carax's films, this one is the most sympathetic towards its women. In Carax's first film "Boy Meets Girl," and likewise in "Lovers On The Bridge," the heroine is cold and self-absorbed. Here, there are two leading ladies, and both are warm and feminine, even though Juliette Binoche has a trendy androgynous haircut. Julie Delpy is particularly selfless and heroic as Alex's girlfriend. Her most heroic act is to love such a narcissistic, distant man. Alex is the only unpleasant character. All of Carax's protagonists are like this. They don't care about their own lives or the lives of others. Nothing interests them other than their own emotions, which they dwell on forever. Alex is equally ready to kill himself or somebody else, in both cases without cause. Even his love for Juliette Binoche is really a kind of self-obsession. It would be nice to ignore him, but he epitomizes Carax's main themes: youthful emotion, sensation, irrationality, and egoism. He is the point, and you can't get past him. But Carax's style has considerably improved here over "Boy Meets Girl." The film is in lush, heavy colour. The camera moves more, and Carax modifies Godard's famous jump cuts into something that might be called the Carax cut, when the screen suddenly goes black for a second, and then cuts back to the same shot as before. It's a strange, fragmented technique. And as I said, other than Alex, the characters are more likeable than in Carax's other films. That might make "Bad Blood" the most enjoyable of them all, although I think "Lovers On The Bridge" is objectively better. But even so, "Bad Blood" is an acquired taste. Carax's style is very artificial, but it completely lacks irony. His films are very serious. Carax reveres Godard, but they're nothing alike. Even Alex's narcissism is driven by a kind of conviction. He doesn't just want to feel pleasure, he wants and believes in some kind of abstract grand destiny. It can be said that a similar conviction destroyed Carax's career. He could easily have become a hip, popular director of youth-culture films, if he had only toned down his irrationality in favour of self-aware irony and cynicism. Instead, he went to greater extremes with each film, and finally bankrupted three producers with "Lovers On The Bridge," a complete commercial failure. Then he practically disappeared. Thus, his films may be hard to sympathize with, but they inspire a kind of respect for their director. |
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