Mauvais Sang

Leos Carax was twenty-six when he made his second feature, and it is the film that defined what the French press had started calling the cinéma du look — a generation who had grown up on advertising and Godard in roughly equal measure. It took the Prix Louis-Delluc for 1986 and the Alfred Bauer Prize at Berlin the following year, and it introduced the partnership between Carax and Denis Lavant that has now lasted forty years.

The plot is a heist, more or less: a comet is passing, Paris is airless, a sexually transmitted disease is killing the young, and two tired criminals played by Michel Piccoli and Hans Meyer need a serum stolen from a laboratory. Alex, a card-sharp and ventriloquist, is brought in to do it. Juliette Binoche, then twenty-two, plays Piccoli's much younger girlfriend. Jean-Yves Escoffier lit the whole thing in saturated primaries against black, and the film moves in bursts of physical performance rather than dialogue — Lavant was a trained acrobat and Carax uses him like one.

Its reputation now rests less on the story than on the conviction that a film can simply stop and let a piece of music take over. British and American critics were slow to it; Carax has since been claimed by everyone from Claire Denis to the Safdie brothers. If you have seen Holy Motors and wondered where that sensibility came from, it is here, already fully formed and thirty years earlier.