The Punk Poetics of MAUVAIS SANG (1986)

From Letterboxd (June 7, 2018).

Leos Carax made his second film when he was 25 years old, which featured Denis Lavant and Juliette Binoche, two of France’s greatest actors, also in their budding youth, and the juvenescence shows. Mauvais Sang is, in its content, very much about young genius amidst a powerfully, at times violently, patriarchal world, and the prevailing attitude underlying its form is, essentially, punk — Carax’s reckless, personal style in gleeful cahoots with the primal energies of Lavant and Binoche — as if the filmmakers were rebelling against the mainstream film industry that, more than often not, will exploit and stifle the youthful spirit of independents.

On the surface it looks and moves like a Nouvelle Vague film, in particular Jean-Luc Godard’s, with its repeating shots, jump-cutting shots, switching to black-and-white, and cutting off the soundtrack, all for an emotional experience arising out of formal bricolage, itself inspired by these critic-turned-filmmakers’ knowledge of film history and filmic techniques. But the sensibility of Mauvais Sang is primarily that of the silent cinema or, better yet, the fantasies of Jean Cocteau, with much help coming from Denis Lavant’s magical gift of performance and physicality. The expressions and gestures are most potently realized in devastating close-ups, while so much of the film…