Boy Meets Girl
When Alex Dupont aka Léos Carax made his first film, Boy Meets Girl, he was just 24 years old. His contemporaries are Jean-Jacques Beineix or Luc Besson, he knows how to create strong images that seem to stand on their own, but unlike his contemporaries, he is closer to Cocteau than to Carné or to Godard than to Lelouch. Hergé is a claimed reference in the same way as a certain rock posture venerating Bowie, Iggy Pop or Scott Walker, while The Rita Mitsouko explodes. These abundant references question the identity of the author and his singularity. But who is Mr. X? The production of the aptly named Pola X (1999, unreleased in Canada), almost ten years after the incredible adventure of Les amants du Pont-Neuf, outlines the beginnings of a response and digs a path in which his two other films are engulfed. Holy Motors (2013) and Annette (2020) tell stories of our time that only cinema seems able to take on, moving from a story around a hypothesis of a schizophrenic, performative and virtual fictional character, to the planetary success of an improbable child endowed with extraordinary vocal qualities. But in the end, it is still and always about excessiveness, for a baroque filmmaker, with exploding singularity.
Alex, an aspiring writer, spies on lovers to find inspiration. When Florence leaves him, he meets Mireille, a suicidal young woman who seems to be his alter ego. The first feature film by Leos Carax.
Leos Carax
Born in 1960 under the name of Alex Dupont, Leos Carax (anagram of Alex and Oscar) is one of those directors whose atypical career has managed to reconcile outbursts and long absences, becoming an object of cult despite its sporadic character. After his film studies, Carax quickly launched himself into directing. His first films, Boy Meets Girl and Mauvais sang, already reveal his original style, with dreamlike romanticism, as well as the presence of his favorite actor, Denis Lavant. Following the difficult shooting of Les amants du Pont-neuf, eight years passed before Carax shot a new feature film: Pola X, adaptation of Pierre ou les ambiguïtés by Herman Melville. A new withdrawal in the 2000s, the filmmaker made a remarkable return to the front of the stage in 2012 with Holy Motors. Almost ten years later, the musical film Annette, the fruit of a collaboration with the group Sparks, opens the Cannes Film Festival.
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The image is happiness. Leos Carax's cinema
Jean-François Hamel, Ciné-Bulles (Free translation)
Leos Carax. For some, this name is unknown or still obscure. Many have not seen his films or have simply heard of them; others were indignant, lost by the proposals of this resolutely singular filmmaker. For still others, he alone evokes, in barely a handful of films, a whole section of contemporary French cinema since the 1980s. He carries on his shoulders, with Philippe Garrel, the heritage of the New Wave, in particular that of Jean-Luc Godard, with whom he shares a taste for audacity.
