Leos Carax’s Mauvais Sang

One of Jean Cocteau’s most famous films was Le sang d'un poete. Cocteau makes a posthumous appearance in Leos Carax’s l986 Mauvais sang currently being revived at Film Forum. One of Carax’s characters looks at the back of a white haired man and says that’s Cocteau only to be informed that the famed playwright, poet and director is dead. But actually the kind of poetic cinema Cocteau advocated is alive and kicking in Mauvais Sang which is literally about blood. The movie could have referenced another work with blood in the title, De sang- froid, In Cold Blood, to the extent that it’s about both murderers (the death of the youthful gangster in the end recalls the poetic ending of Godard’s Au Bout du Soffle) and blood itself. However it must be said that for all its hot blood, Carax maintains a cool esthetic distance or heartlessness throughout. The plot concerns a retrovirus, STBO, that is created by people who “make love without love.” This is literally the bad blood of the film’s title and the blood imagery continues as Anna (Juliette Binoche), one of the film molls (the other is played by Julie Delpy) describes herself as not being able to stop crying and suffering from hemophiliac tears. Carax creates little campuses of imagery. When Alex (Denis Levant) meets with Marc (Michel Piccoli) and his other crony Hans (Hans Meyer) they remove their shirts in an almost viral way, as if they’d contracted a new ailment, lighting up cigarettes bare chested from then on. Alex, a strange and silent kid who his parents named the Chatterbox, has grown up to be a ventriloquist. You can parse the double entendres and metaphors that run through the film the way you’d analyze a poem. The work of another renowned avant-gardist,  David Bowie, “Modern Love” is part of the soundtrack.

Holy Motors

Leos Carax’s Holy Motors, currently playing at Film Forum, is surrealism that is not like Dali or Bunuel or David Lynch. If there’s a Theater of the Absurd, characterized by the work of Ionesco, Beckett, Genet and Pinter in which meaning is turned upside down—in terms of the signifiers of personality and language—then Holy Motors represents the Cinema of the Absurd. However, for a surrealist or absurdist work Holy Motors is oddly linear. The main character Mr. Oscar (an allusion to the Oscars?) is driven around Paris in a white stretch limo by his elegant blond chauffeur Celine (an allusion to Louis-Ferdinand Celine the author of the surreal Journey to the End of the Night?).  In this regard, Holy Motors can also be viewed as a road movie. Mr. Oscar dons varying guises as he fulfills his successsive “rendezvous.” He’s dressed as a crippled beggar, as a superhero whose feats are played out in a series of images that represent an amalgam of an MRI and a video game, and a Christ figure with an erection who kidnaps a top fashion model and dresses her in a burka. In two of his assignations he murders himself, quickly surviving in the form of a double (was the director influenced Dostoevsky’s The Double: A Petersburg Poem or the Borges story based on it, The Other?). In several sequences Carax reverts to more classic drama. In one the punishment Oscar’s daughter, Angele, receives for lying is “to be you, to have to live with yourself.” In another the aged Oscar who has been transformed into a character named Mr. Vorgan apologizes to his niece for giving her the money to attract a man who doesn’t love her, but the emotion conjured up is quickly cut short as Carax’s character gets up from his death bed, pats his niece and his dog, and walks off. The movie ends with Celine returning her stretch to Holy Motors where all the cars talk to each other before being swallowed up by the darkness.