Papa Mike's Video #27: Leos Carax's MAUVAIS SANG (1986)

 (Aka "Bad Blood") 

"Let's listen and let our feelings flow as they will."

I mean, if the STBO doesn't get them, the cigarettes will?

A film intoxicated by cinema and the more it goes on the more that dizzying, playful but extremely tender hearted it reveals itself (or tenderly extreme, maybe both), and yet while the technical bravura and the confidence to believe with such iron clad conviction not that it even will work on a narrative level but that it works so profoundly on that tactile, ethereal plane that cinema can be, is impressive, and the theme of a lack of real love manifested as this infection is a provocative one, it's Binoche and Levant together that makes this sing.

Like Breathless, the movie sets one io for a seemingly straightforward crime story, and then Carax has these two kids hanging out for a long time and they can really get to know each other and we can sink in to their knowing yet wholly emotional bonding (and a little radio play, Bowie and shaving cream hijinks far from don't hurt). In particular I realized once Binoche entered the film and that parachute scene - wIhere she has two men, Alex and Marc, telling her to jump and not jump and then she goes and faints and Alex has to jump after her - it elevates to another level.

I don't mean to suggest that Alex and Levant aren't electrifying or captivating as character and performer respectively (and together), though like Belmondo in Breathless you need someone like Seberg he can play off of or else he is just going around turning over Volkswagen beetles (that was a moment I laughed out loud as the kids say), and Binoche is that great person to be with and play off. It's a dynamic where she loves the older man (after, all as she basically states with that spark in her eye, she likes tall men and men 20-30 years older... or younger, quixotic phrase that fits this splendidly), and yet he has fallen totally head over heels with her... while Lise, the Julie Delpy character, still loves Alex very intensely following their early-in-the-story lovemaking, which by the way is beautifully shot briefly and to focus on faces, and yet this also calls into question if he or she have this uncanny STD that affects the loveless, even if it's one-sided.

But with Binoche there's this sincerity to how she listens and speaks and has to say very little really to convey this intensity and More Than Ennui. Carax and his DP and the camera love her, and I think she brings out even more from Levant than he shows earlier in the film when it takes a moment or two to get into the rhythms of Carax's editing and post modern approach to telling a story like we are plopped into the middle.  And by the time we are in the last twenty minutes?  The close-ups are no longer startling and instead feel... right. 

 It takes a moment to find one's bearings, but once one does Mauvais Sang has this great sensation of "Hey, why not?" And it's not that as an artist he wants to give the shove to all conventions, rather the way characters act and behave and look on screen embraces while subverting the expectations because... what else is cinema to do except to take risks?

So the men plotting the Big Job to steal steal vaccine are shirtless like 90% of the time? Why not? Explosive moments of violence are shot without any adherence to traditional geography for shots? If it can still click emotionally and you get that stunning push in on Binoche's face as this old and young man fight in front of her? Why not? All those close ups? Go for it! That one theme from the score of Caligula as a musical tone for when someone calls Alex and the answering machine goes off? Par for the course, man, that becomes minor. I don't know if all the basic parts of this story are wholly original- how a young man has such resentments and pent up energy against some people and such strong love and equal indifference to other young women depending on the scene or woman, a heist gone south- but the execution is.

Carax isn't stumbling to find his voice, rather the voice is the exuberance of cinema as well as the harrowing nature in drama and tragedy (all those whispering voices and tones). The brilliance of it doesn't hit you all at once but rather as this slow rising wave that keeps crashing; it's like the cinematic equivalent of going for a swim off the beach. And what a joy that he has such game performers ready to run and jump and punch and cry and do everything that cinema can show with such poetic force.