The Lover. The thief. The filmmaker. At their most suave, they are all seducers. At their most deft, they are all sleight-of-hand artists. At their most naked, they are all romantics.
In French director Leos Carax’s 1986 Mauvais sang, the lover, the thief, and the filmmaker all blur into one. Carax’s steadiest leading man, Denis Lavant, plays a character who is both lover and thief. As in all the Carax films Lavant appears in — Boy Meets Girl, Les amants du Pont-Neuf, and last year’s Holy Motors — his name here is Alex, the filmmaker’s own. Carax’s Christian names, Alex Oscar, provide him with an anagrammed pseudonym.
That his stand-in is playing a thief is fitting. As a director, Carax is the most generous of thieves. You can watch Mauvais sang (his second and still closest-to-perfect movie, rereleased in a lustrous restoration that brings Jean-Yves Escoffier’s cinematography a richness and sheen I have never seen in it before) as a series of reverent swipes from decades of movies that have preceded it. A lovers’ country idyll near the beginning recalls Renoir’s A Day in the Country and the en plein air tradition of 1930s French cinema which the nouvelle vague directors urbanized and appropriated. (Just as the rosy flesh of one of the lovers, the impossibly young Julie Delpy, recalls the women in his father’s canvasses.) The heavy nighttime solitude of the film’s deserted Paris backstreets recalls the warren of the Casbah in Pépé le Moko, or the photographs of Brassai. The bold red, white, and blues of the subway station in which the film opens echo the pop graphics of 1960s Godard films, just as a meandering, 30-minute nighttime encounter between Lavant and Juliette Binoche calls up the cramped hotel-room sparring of Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg in Breathless. At one point, Serge Reggiani, the hero of Jacques Becker’s Casque d’or, walks into the film cradling a dog who might be Asta from the Thin Man movies. A bed bearing a woman’s imprint inevitably (and jarringly) brings to mind the imprint left on Mrs. Bates’ bed in Psycho. Binoche enters the movie in a white dress and the silent awareness that vibrates between her and Lavant as they both ride a bus seems modeled on the humid eroticism that passes between Jean Peters and Richard Widmark on the subway in the opening scene of Sam Fuller’s Pickup on South Street. A laughing Binoche, radiant in candlelight in a silent black-and-white interlude, might be summoning the ghost of Louise Brooks. There’s an Inspector Mouchette. And in the movie’s most exhilarating sequence, Carax and Lavant suggest what West Side Story might have been as Lavant runs dancing past blocks of sidewalk hoardings accompanied by David Bowie’s “Modern Love” (a scene Noah Baumbach couldn’t help but lift for Frances Ha).
The witty generosity of each of these lifts lies in Carax’s refusal to hoard them. He’s a little like Robert Mitchum in Nicholas Ray’s The Lusty Men, crawling under the house in which he grew up to find the few coins and broken down revolver he stowed there as a kid. Carax proffers his movie references to us like a kid making a gift of his stray treasures.
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