Boy Meets Girl (1984, Leos Carax)

Relatively normal-seeming indie film – it took me a while to recalibrate my expectations to the lower budget, the subdued Denis Lavant, these two artists still so young and unaware of the great works they’d eventually achieve. It’s new-wavey, and in love with love, and just wonderful, so it’s my problem that I can’t help but compare it to the later films.

Mireille Perrier (later the sorta-narrator of Chocolat) is “Girl” – both of them are going through breakups when they meet and hang out at a party after Alex has a long night walking dazed through the city. He goes off on his own again but comes back, too late to save her from bathtub scissor suicide.


Mr. X (2014, Tessa Louise-Salome)

A talking-heads interview doc about the films of Leos Carax, with clips. I watched this after catching up with Boy Meets Girl, the last of his major features I hadn’t seen before, and revisiting clips of his other films was pleasure enough, but this doc was remarkably good on its own, projecting interviews visually over film footage and showing outtakes and on-set footage and rehearsals and auditions.

Richard Brody: “[The] enduring enemy in his films is ordinariness, routine, mediocrity. And just as the men in his films are willing to go to dangerous extremes to poeticize their life, so the kinds of women his male characters are attracted to are also poetically extravagant.”