Here is a 40-minute autobiographical jeu d’esprit from Leos Carax, the renowned director of Les Amants du Pont-Neuf, Bad Blood, Holy Motors and Annette; a body of work featuring such stars as Juliette Binoche, Michel Piccoli, Kylie Minogue, Denis Lavant and Adam Driver. First unveiled at Cannes this year, the puckish elusiveness of the piece is announced in the title itself.
C’est Pas Moi, or It’s Not Me, is a cine-collage essay in the manner of Godard, although the audio soundtrack does not quite have that papier-mache roughness that Godard often created. Godard’s voice appears briefly in an answering-machine message to Carax, a fragment that Carax might not have dared include while the great man was still alive. It’s a mosaic of Carax’s movies, private videos, archival footage and classic clips, punctuated with big san-serif intertitles: gnomic maxims and prose-poem micro-fragments.
