When we meet Alex (Denis Lavant), the bad boy protagonist of Leos Carax’s dystopian fable Mauvais Sang, he is leaning, naked, against a mossy tree with doe-eyed lover Lise (a 16-year-old Julie Delpy in one of her first film roles). “My allergies are flaring up, like in summer,” he says, eyes moist. As they escape the woods on Alex’s motorcycle, their hair and clothes flutter in the wind. Alive with a gentle, awkward fragility, it’s a strange introduction to the antihero of a grimy heist film – one so shadowed by death and doom that its frames often look like ink-specked gig posters.
Carax is better known for his later work: 2021’s Annette, starring Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard as a comedian and an opera singer who conceive a singing puppet daughter; and 2012’s Holy Motors, in which an enigmatic man (Lavant, again) is chauffeured between fantastical roles. But Mauvais Sang, the French director’s second feature from 1986, is equally bold in concept yet sparing in execution, driven by a crystal-clear sincerity. From his penchant for surrealism to his abiding affection for hopeless romantics, outsiders and charlatans, we can observe many of Carax’s later obsessions developing here.
