User Reviews

This second film by Leos Carax is one which continued his focus on romance between alienated youth. It is a more expansive film than the earlier Boy Meets Girl (1984) but is overall a little less satisfying. More than any of his other films, this one plays around with characters and motives of genre cinema. In this case, we have a heist plot as the basis for what is otherwise typical Carax material. The McGuffin is a sexually transmitted virus that effects people who engage in sex with no emotional involvement. A serum which can cure the disease is locked away in a high security government building. Marc, a gangster in deep debt enlists the services of Alex the teenage son of one of his friends to steal the precious drug. Alex falls in love with Marc's lover Anna.

In all honesty, the crime story was dealt with in a very half-hearted manner. I guess when you consider that the virus is of such an absurdly whimsical nature it's not so surprising that it's not exactly taken very seriously. Like all the other Carax films, you really have to get on board with his very cinematic style to have any chance of appreciating them. This one has its share of expressive moments that happen with little story-based sense but which are highly cinematic such as where Denis Lavant suddenly runs along a street while sound-tracked to David Bowie's 'Modern Love', it's a very typical Carax scene where the character can express his feelings in a manner that is pure cinema. Likewise, the impressively shot parachute scene is also coming from a similar place. On the whole, this is a very visual film with good use of colour throughout. I personally think that this is the least of the 'Alex' trilogy through. It feels a little too uneven and bitty overall, like the director had a lot of ideas but with no coherent plan of how to connect them together effectively. So, I would say that this is ultimately an interesting but flawed film.

You have amazing scenes here. The energetic and nail biting heist scene, the sky-diving scene, and of course, the scene in which Chatterbox runs down the street to "Modern Love" by David Bowie. How shamelessly Noah Baumbauch stole this scene for Frances Ha, which compared to Mauvais Sang is a sophomore year, film school project. This is a master class in filmmaking. However, it's conversation scenes lag on for far too long, don't amount to much, and extend the run time of the film. It didn't need to be two hours.

You will remember Mauvais Sang because of: - its unique & very recognizable director's style; - visual experiments that have broadened the cinema art horizon (please don't forget that this film was released in 1986 and was copied since then in many other films and videos, which makes it less experimental nowadays); - high energy level due to variation in static close-ups and dynamic scenes shot by the moving camera; - love story that touches but stays far away from clichés; - plot that plays with stereotypes of a gangster film and leaves enough space for your imagination.

Visual ideas of Leos Carax can be encountered in, for instance, Romeo + Juliet by Buz Luhrmann, Delicatessen by Jeunet & Caro and a recent art house hit - Le Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain by Jean-Pierre Jeunet.

CAHIERS DU CINÉMA: There are no rules to cinema. No set way of getting from point A to point B, or a general expectation on the part of the filmmaker to include certain themes and conventions for the benefit of the audience. A film should make us think and feel; the rest is purely secondary. At twenty-six years old, Leos Carax understood this notion perfectly; taking inspiration from the early Nouvelle Vague films of director Jean Luc Godard and producing a work that underlined the key themes already established in his bleak and beautiful debut feature, Boy Meets Girl (1984), albeit, with a more clearly-defined and pronounced approach to the conventions of genre and narrative. Like Godard's early work, such as À bout de soufflé (1960), Bande à part (1964) and Pierrot le fou (1965), Mauvais Sang (1986) focuses on a number of weighty, existentialist themes - such as unrequited love and the alienation of Parisian youth - disguised by a series of hard-boiled genre conventions - brazenly lifted from post-war crime cinema and early film noir - and an approach to character that is filled with wit, emotion and searing imagination.

L'ÉNFANT TERRIBLE: As ever with Carax, the results are unconventional and highly unique, as we follow a story that is deliberately trivialised in comparison to the more important hopes and dreams of the central characters, whose collective spirit of defiance, adventure and melancholic yearning spill out into the actual visual presentation of the film itself. Here, the similarities to Boy Meets Girl are clear, with lead actor Denis Lavant once again portraying a misfit character named Alex who here comes to act as a representation for Carax himself. However, unlike Boy Meets Girl, the film is this time presented in bold and vivid colour, with much of the action taking place on purposely built sets that fall somewhere between the traditional Gothic architecture of actual, rural France and the cold, retro-futurist design of Terry Gilliam's masterpiece Brazil (1985). Once again, the design of the film reflects the ideas behind the characters, with the notions of escape and of closing yourself off from the outside world and indulging in romantic folly being central to the underlining spirit of the characters, which are here, more important than the widely recognisable aspects of narrative development.

CINÉMA DU LOOK: By visualising the film in such a manner, Carax is able to create a stark and somewhat surreal nocturnal underworld where his characters hide out - free from the rules of society and the conventions of time - with the production design, cars and costumes all standing as deliberate anachronisms to maintain the idea of a world removed from our own. It also works with the ironic, referential tone, in which elements of Godard give way to Chapin, who gives way to Welles, who gives way to West Side Story (1961), and all wrapped up in a preposterous plot that ties in with other French films of this cinematic period - later dubbed the "cinema du look" - in particular, Diva (1981) by Jean Jacques Beineix and Subway (1985) by Luc Besson. The basic outline of the story behind Mauvais Sang involves Lavant's young street punk running away from responsibility and inadvertently ending up helping two elderly criminals in a plot to steal an AIDS like virus from a futuristic, high-security laboratory, so that they can pay off an out-standing debt to a matriarchal Mafia boss. Along the way he dodges an old adversary and the girlfriend that he left behind and falls head over heels in love with the young fiancé of one of the criminals that he's there to help.

L'AMOUR MODERN: This strand of the narrative is the one that is most clearly defined here, both in the romanticised nature of the film and the world view of its characters, as well as the appropriation of the American crime-film references and pretensions to post-war melodrama. Here, Alex is quite literally a boy playing the part of a gangster, with his self-consciously hard-boiled dialog, swagger and no nonsense attitude as he talks about his time spent in a young offender's institute, and how it has turned his insides into cement. Through his relationship with Anna - herself a cinematic reference to Anna Karina, right down to the Vivre sa Vie (1962) haircut - the weight of Alex's internal angst and macho bravado begins to erode, leading to that near-iconic moment in which our hero, realising his unspoken love for Anna, runs down the street in an exaggerated tracking shot, skipping, jumping and cart-wheeling to the sound Bowie's Modern Love. An astounding and unforgettable sequence that comes out of nowhere and immediately reinforces the film's unique sense of romantic fantasy and pure escapism against a backdrop of would-be gangster theatrics.

STRANGULATION BLUES: The juxtaposition between grit, melodrama, fantasy and genre subversion is characteristic of Carax's work, with the self-consciously artificial world of the film and the playful and yet decidedly romantic nature of Alex and Anna's relationship tying together the themes of Boy Meets Girl with those of the director's third film, the grand cinematic "disaster" Les Amants Du Pont-Neuf (1991). Like those films, Mauvais Sang uses concept and narrative merely to present a reason for the characters to meet and interact, as the rest of the film develops from a collection of random scenes - linked by one or two reoccurring characters - that accumulate over the course of the film's duration to create a kind of whole. With this film, Carax created a fascinating cinematic abstraction of young love and alienation, unfolding in a world in which the representation of the audience is a young voyeur played by the director himself; a keen comment on the nature of film, and yet another fascinating component to this striking, unique and highly imaginative ode to love, escapism, and cinema itself.

'By the time you finally learn how to live, it's too late.' This brilliant, bizarre, unique film is one more proof that Leos Carax is a genius. The film is so extreme in its technique and imagery that it can be placed in no category. Everything about it is original, even its derivative aspects. Carax is unconventional even when copying or echoing. Sometimes the film is so mannered and arch that it resembles a cartoon strip. But this is playfully misleading. At other times, the film is desperately emotional and heart-rending. It even has hyper-realistic close-ups of microscopic details. The lighting is crisp, hyper-real also. It is so hyper-real that it is utterly surreal. It is designed to oscillate between the real and the imagined constantly, at an ever increasing rate, in order to drive the viewer mad. Soon the viewer will be almost as insane as the director, or so the director hopes, and then the viewer will at last understand. One of the aims of the director is to reduce the viewer to pulp, but not just any pulp: he must be reduced to pulp fiction. Everything is a joke, but also everything is serious. Nothing has only one side to it. The heavily stylized approach is shown in every respect. The sets are carefully colour-coded, with red a major theme, appearing in ties and on walls, in velvet, in blood, often contrasted with black. There is a spectacular, manically exciting sequence where the young hero (Denis Lavant) impulsively runs down the street doing a spontaneous dance to a David Bowie song, and the camera tracks along beside him for a very long time. This kind of 'moving mania' (not unlike a totally berserk form of 'movie mania') has the restless and impassioned insistence upon constant motion that one sees in his next film, 'The Lovers of the Pont Neuf' with the speed boat on the Seine and the fireworks. In the story, also written by Carax, we have so much influence of Andre Breton's novel 'Nadja': love for the impossible woman who is obviously insane in her irresistibly fascinating way, chance encounters, the miraculous erupting in everyday life, impossible visions (when the hero first sees Juliette Binoche on a bus, but cannot make out her features properly through the glass, and yet knows that he loves her already because he 'feels' her). We have the impossibly beautiful Julie Delpy aged only 19, and already in her sixth film, with the unformed face of an infant, and yet her eyes deep pools of passion already, the eyes of a passionate child in that perfect Madonna face. Juliette Binoche is 22 but looks twelve, and her beauty is greater even than that of Delpy's, we cannot take our eyes off her, her calm is the calm of a lake when there is no wind, her face is the face of a lake with no clouds, her beauty is the beauty of a lake in the sunset, the sleekness of her movements is that of a fish glimpsed for a moment as it leaps above the surface of that lake. The story is purposely mocked by the film, its pretext of a thriller plot so absurd that we are encouraged to laugh, realizing there is no plot, there is only life. A virus is spreading: it is killing those who make love without loving, and the vaccine must be stolen. Such is the 'plot'. There are various inside jokes. The director himself plays 'the neighbourhood voyeur, who peeks through the window every night', a fine rebuke of the director against himself. Then there is an earnest conversation is a café where a hardened killer and gangster suddenly breaks off and insists that he sees Jean Cocteau on the other side of the room with his back turned, until he is reminded that Jean Cocteau is dead. There are many intensely stylized shots of the backs of heads. Features and faces are often masked: at one point, Binoche peeks through a hole she has torn in a paper napkin. In another scene, Delpy has a scarf stretched across her face below her eyes for the entire time. There is an interlude in the film in the middle of the night, when all the characters in the story are asleep. So of course, Carax being Carax, he shows them all sleeping in their respective beds in their respective abodes, just to let us see that side of them; the sinister American woman gangster ('the Americaine') has her lipstick all smudged as she lies unconscious, lost in her undoubtedly vicious dream. The young lead is called Alex, which is Carax's real first name (the name Leos Carax being an anagram, the man Leos Carax being an enigma, Alex Dupont being Leos Carax, this film being Alex Dupont being Leos Carax being a voyeur). Everything is original. It is true that some of it verges on farce, saved at the last minute by Carax's brilliance from jumping in front of the Metro just as a man does in the opening sequence. Carax is always about to throw himself and his film in front of the oncoming train. He is always about to throw his train in front of an oncoming film. He is always about to be serious, he is always serious. He is a daredevil. Just as his characters throw themselves into the sky from a plane, parachuting for no evident reason, with Binoche passing out before she can pull her ripcord but being saved by the hero who clutches her in his arms and pulls his for them both (we see shots of them looking down from inside the parachute, and how he filmed those I really cannot imagine), so Carax pulls his own ripcord over and over again, with every minute of the film, and saves it repeatedly from tumbling to earth, with the awe-inspiring audacity of his manic, uncontrollable creativity.

... for me, the assertion that (the then 22-year old) Juliette Binoche is the "girlfriend" of (61-year old) Michel Piccoli was really hard to take, and undermined the credibility somewhat. I know they're French, and the plot was a bit far-fetched anyway, but I had a real problem with this aspect.

Having said that, it's a nicely bonkers mixture of tropes and genres and overall quite fun, if you just "go with it". Not a patch on Holy Motors, though, in my view.

Both the editing and the soundtrack display the avant-garde art idea of a young film maker. However, this slightly conservative story clearly does not support such a strong desire for expression. The mainly reason of current situation probably is that Leos Carax, the director of the film, didn't figure out how to expertly combine a commercial script with private style during that time. Therefore, though some independent parts is amazing and outstanding, the final result is somehow a bit out of control.

On the whole this is typical artsy-fartsy film-making. Interesting visual ideas are clustered with mucho highbrow babbling so that you can brand it something like "post-modern cinema" to look cleverer than you are.

Actually a bunch of visual ideas are much more interesting than the rest so it's not only the dialogue which spoils the art house soup. And that's why I won't hesitate in calling this pretentious auteur stuff: most images are just plain self-conscious (cleverly framed for art's sake - call it experimental cinema if you like, I say it's simply annoying), pseudo-poetical situations and lines (pure Godard-style) and a big inscrutable vacuum all over the place (plot construction is too vulgar a thing for artists to spoil their hands with it).

Next time I'll try Ed Wood's Plan 9 from outer space. At least I won't laugh to forget how much I'm bored.

The Alex Trilogy which is made up of this "Boy Meets Girl" and "The Lovers On The Bridge" is a great cinematic treasure, everyone who likes movies should try to watch. I guarantee anyone who watches this will at least like one. This sci-fi/heist movie second part of the trilogy is set in a world of venereal disease where "The Love without Love" sex without love, can be fatal. Alex is the son of a great thief, whose old mates hire him in the hopes that the apple hasn't fallen far from the tree. Alex falls in love Juliette Binoche, one of his fellow criminals daughter/lover(I was a bit confused about that part). Nothing else needs to be said because nothing else is important. Leos Carax's films are poetry they whimsical and stylish and romantic and personal and frenzied. Cinema is a stage where Carax's Alex finds himself repeatedly at odds with the world and in search of connection, sometimes he finds it, sometimes he doesn't. Sometimes he, lives sometimes he dies. The only constants are David Bowie songs, dancing, and general awesomeness. Denis Lavant's rocket sprint to "Modern Love" is as close to sublime as movies get.

The best thing about this French New Wave throwback certainly isn't the narrative-impaired non-story, in which an aging criminal in debt (Michel Piccoli) enlists the young son of a dead colleague for a daring robbery of a pharmaceutical company. The combination of familiar pulp fiction outline with stylishly indulgent camera technique recalls the early work of Truffaut and Godard, and in true nouvelle-vague tradition writer director Leos Carax eventually dismisses his plot altogether to concentrate, at length and to little purpose, on the visual mood of his film. Along the way a bittersweet romance is (almost) allowed to develop between Piccoli's young mistress (Juliete Binoche) and hired thief Denis Lavant, whose angular punk features and physique (he was trained as an acrobat and mime) provide a fascinating contrast to his co-star's cool, reflective calm. The attention Carax lavishes on Binoche, who isn't required to do much more than simply look demure, may seem to border on infatuation, but some latitude should be allowed for the relative youth of the 26 year old auteur.

I think music used throughout this reveals quite a bit of the cinematic exercise.

• Prokofiev's Roméo and Juliette, so a ballet, a cinematic opera on forbidden love between youth that aches to dream. Love that cannot be consummated in the ugly day of light and has to take to dreams, liebestod, Tristan and Isolde.

• Limelight tied into this, that precious bit of Chaplin beneath the big old sappy narratives that was purely evocative body, that was in essence a dance between innocence and star-crossed fate.

• David Bowie, 'Modern Love' aptly enough, so the rush of purely energetic instrumentation, dazzling camera beats, irony, New Wave atonality, in this case the song randomly caught on radio and meant to guide feelings, a dadaist gesture. Denis Lavant leaps across the frame with his wiry seething-petite frame that reminds a bit of the old silent comedians, he's a real pleasure to watch just move.

In something like Beau Travail also with Lavant and operatic, space is arranged bodily, the whole thing is cinematic and flows. Not so here. The guy responsible for this wants to be a little like Godard, so we have the interminable recitations, the poetry, the deliberately crude crime plot where you only need a gun and a girl, always Godard's weaker spots.

This too bad. Because there are visual moments here that left me practically giddy, for example love as a matter of leaping from a plane, a matter of joint flight and tenderly balancing mid-air.

Instead we get a patchy, stuttery ride that only now and then blossoms into some internal scenery.

The opportunity missed is that the eye dances but is not fully consumed with its musical capacity. Nouvelle Vague ruins this by proxy. I like to think that Wong Kar Wai saw this and immediately knew which parts worked.

This is the best film in Love trilogy of Leos Carax. Leos Carax said he is always interested in Greek mythology. He successfully showed that Greek mythology in this film through a main character, Denis Lavant. He has the Oedipus complex about his father, but his father are killed by someone. And, father's friend looks for Alex to get a help for a crime. Also, he is falling in love with a mystery woman. However, she loves father's friend. Thus, he has the Oedipus complex about father's friend again even though his father died. And, he commits a crime with father's friend. This film shows fantastic images and perfect performance by Juliette Binoche, Denis Lavant and Michel Piccoli. The ending scene is unforgettable.

Wonderful performances by Denis Lavant (best performance as mute prisoner in "The Night of the Kings"), Juliette Binoche (best performance is in "Certified Copy") and Julie Delpy (best performance "Three colors-White"). Carax is to be credited for casting all three and getting great performances when all of them were relatively unknown. Lavant has worked with Carax on his films (in "Boy meets girl" and in "Lovers on the Bridge", where his characters are called Alex!; and in "Holy Motors")

Lavant's character is called Chatterbox. While character avers he was a silent child and survived 15 months of his served prison term by being silent. Yet, he is the most talkative character in the film, who is very knowledgeable about art and artists, correcting a "heavy" that Jean Cocteau is not alive but dead (Carax was possibly influenced by Cocteau). The film's script has several such nuggets.

Though the film has a weird tale, the strength is first of all in the use of color--clothes, exterior walls, furniture--transforming each scene into a painting.

The second awesome sequence is Denis Lavant's athletic dance in the empty street keeping to the beat of David Bowie's song "Modern Love," which is supposed to reflect the weird theme of the film of loveless sex. Carax' choice of Prokofieff's and Britten's music is creditable.

Carax worked with cinematographer Jean-Yves Escoffier until his death in 2003. Another good decision made by Carax for whom visuals, music and actors matter.

He is a genius with images He is entwined and tormented He is Leos Carax, a true comicstrip kind of cinematographer He is great in all his movies, but this one is the best My all time favorite

Seems I'm in the minority here but I'll take it on the chin and won't open a vein just yet. Carax clearly has his admirers and we can only guess at the reasons. Mabe youthful rebellion against a mainstream way of telling a story; maybe disciples of the 'new'different-is- automatically-BETTER school. Who knows. I guess it's fair to say that I Endured this movie rather than Enjoyed it. Depending on your point of view Carax has an endearing and/or irritating habit of fading in the middle of a scene and then coming back to the same point. Why? You tell me. In its favor it does feature two of the now loveliest (in 1986 they were merely pretty) French actresses in Julie Delpy and Juliette Binoche plus two all-time great actors in Michel Piccoli and Serge Reggiani (albeit only a cameo for the latter) but against this it throws in one of those leading men who seem to get cast inexplicably given they lack virtually every criteria for leading men, I'm thinking of the two Vincents, Cassell and Gallo, Benoit Magimal et al. In this case it's Denis Lavant (a favorite of Carax) who resembles nothing so much as a sullen Russ Tamblyn and is one anchovy short of a pizza given that he starts out by dumping Julie Delpy, who is herself one egg short of an omelette by being head-over-heels in love with this yob in the first place. Plot? You don't want to know, believe me.

who can talk about it? who can evaluate it?

never try to do so

just take it as itself

Half of it is mesmerizingly beautiful, inventive and meaningful. The other half is stupid and cringy. So I guess the rating should be exactly in between.

Having seen only his incredibly intense 1999 film, Pola X, I didn't exactly know what to expect with Bad Blood. The film is as a whole not as effective as the later film, but it serves to solidify Leos Carax in my mind as a truly great director. I love both films, and this one is definitely flawed, but the poetry which comes through onto the screen is absolutely incredible. Alex running down the street to Bowie, the motorcycle getaway, and the amazingly passionate and beautiful final scenes will remain with me for a while... the film is exquisitely wild and reckless and is truly innovative in the way it's put together. Even as I write this, shot after shot and scene after scene resurface in my mind, all of them worthy of mention, and all of them gorgeous and shattering in their own way. Carax is a deserving heir to the thrones erected by the new wave. Bad Blood is the work of a master, whether the film itself is a masterpiece or not... The characters are wonderfully crafted with very nice performances by everyone, it's very watchable and very human poetry of the highest calibre. See it, see a Leos Carax film, any of his films - I'm going to track down Boy Meets Girl and Lovers on the Bridge as soon as I can.

I am fascinated by Leos Carax. In more than 30 years he made just a handful of long films, but what films these are. Each of them reminds me when I get to see them why I love and I am fascinated by cinema, and what an art film making can be under the hands of a director who knows the secrets and ingredients of turning each film, and each scene in his films in something different, something that charms, shocks, can be enjoyable or repulsive, but cannot leave us indifferent.

Mauvais Sang (Bad Blood is the literal translation) will be 30 years old next year. Yet it is not only as fresh as it was made yesterday, but it also has the quality that will make it relevant 30, 60, and 90 years from now (I do not make bets about future that extend between one century :-) ). It's a gangster story in the French tradition, Melville's movies come to mind immediately, and the fact that some of the bad guys are American is actually also a French noir films tradition. Although the making of the film is closer to David Lynch's peak period, 'Mauvais Sang' precludes the best of what Tarantino will make 10 or 15 years later. I actually have almost no doubt that both Lynch and Tarantino saw this film several times and were deeply inspired by it. It is however more - it is a double love story, or two love stories which are sensitive and beautifully told. And then, the final scene makes - so it seems to me - a reverence to 'Casablanca'.

What gives such quality to 'Mauvais Sang'? First, the actors. Michel Piccoli- at the edge of seniority, playing the gangster - combinator whose combines not always succeed best. Breathtakingly beautiful and young Juliette Binoche in one of her first major roles. And, of course, Denis Lavant, Caras's best acting asset ever. Then the cinematography. I do not know how much we owe to Caras and how much to the director of cinematography Jean-Yves Escoffier but almost each shot is a piece of art, and the colors combinations are sublime and uniquely expressive - just watch the repeated combinations of blue, white and red! There are the ingredients, but the ultimate merit belongs without doubt to Leos Carax, a master chef of the French cinema.

Halley comet. aids. alienation. the power of youth. the danger of youth. the envy of elders about young love. carax seems to film this fascinated mostly by the themes of young love. love that can have no meaning for elders, but it's what makes younger people run. even if they're in love with elders and not people of the same age. it seems to somehow be an allegory to the aids disease that was started to spread in the time of the film.

what is well done here is how kinda how it wants to be a film and cinema at the same time. this movie has a plot: a heist involving an antidote that cures deaths from loveless sex. in a way that loveless sex was consequence for aids: elders thinking the "crazy youths" were having sex like rabbits, that's why aids deaths were growing. i was born in the time of the film, so in the aids epidemic i was a child, but i can only imagine the huge amount of religious groups declaring abstinence. hekc, in our days, putting the same mouths in a fountain could be a receptor for aids in our heads. i'm not joking.

at the same time it's cinema: it has influences in the french nouvelle vague which honestly is still field i need to discover properly. it has some influences on mute cinema. and mostly it's cinema in the sense on how it wants to communicate: not through the script or the plot, like the movies, but through the images and the poetry that goes of the mouth of the characters. let's face it: most of the dialogues have that poetic side that makes them transcend any type of films: they want to transcend life. they want to create a new heart about that disparate youth, that feeling of doing things for the sake of it and not let them go. the fear is for the elders. they don't seem to fear the "american lady".

it's style over substance? no: here it seems to be the stile providing the actors to create the substance, the result are two generations in confrontation. one fearless and one fearful. one seems to breathe love, the other seems to have rationality as prevalent. technically is very well made, mostly the colors, but also the big shots carax makes - they don't take that long - and how he films the characters talking. there's no confort here on see.

i don't know who is going to love this. but the first step to enjoy something like this is to forget rules and the things you think are "correct". there's nothing correct, there's good and bad. is to go deep into the cinema it breathes and try to enjoy it without fear of love or hate. it's feeling. it's poetic. that's why it stays.