The thing about becoming a cult director is that you need to deliver something that is genuinely out there. Even if that pushes you into territory that is, frankly, unintelligible. I have no real idea what is going on in Mauvais Sang. There were long periods where I was scrabbling to make sense of things, but every now and again the screen would burst into life with a vengeance. More than a coherent narrative, Mauvais Sang feels like an archipelago of moments, which are loosely arranged around selected ideas. The fact that one of these ideas is that humanity is threatened by a retrovirus and that Piccoli, Binoche and Lavant are about to steal the vaccine, adds a certain piquancy. Other moments include: they’re not really going to make Binoche jump out of the plane are they? Lavant famously dance-running to Bowie’s Modern Love, for no real reason other than to give the film an injection of unimpeachable cool; Binoche and Lavant having a shaving cream fight; and so on and so forth. Carax sets out his stall as a filmmaker whose radical imagination is enough to get you hooked, and to be fair, he has continued to deliver, with Pont Neuf, Holy Motors etcetera. Film as event, rather than narrative; film as a sensory experience rather than an intellectual one, no matter how much of a debt is being paid to Godard, or, one would like to think in this film, Roeg and Cammell´s Performance.
No comments:
Post a Comment