Director and experimenter Leos Carax’s feature debut, which won the Award of the Youth at the 34th Cannes Film Festival.
In 1984, 24-year-old Carax, after his first short and eight years of cinephilia, began shooting his first feature. It is the story of two young people, Alex and Mireille, played by Denis Lavant and Mireille Perrier. Alex’s girlfriend recently left him for his best friend and Mireille has fallen out of love with her partner. Alex roams around Paris, observing the strange people around him and dreaming of becoming a director, while Mireille stays at home listening to music and learning to tap dance. They are invited to the same party where they notice each other among a group of odd people. The first conversation between these two lost young people takes place.
Boy Meets Girl, which was written by Carax and shot by cinematographer Jean-Yves Escoffier, is a series of alternating scenes and cameos about the various kinds of people who live in Paris. Mostly they are quiet and aloof, like the group of office workers from Japan gathered around slot machines or the woman with a child destroying the pictures and poems of her ex-lover. The elderly voice at the beginning talks about irreversible loneliness and this feeling unites all of the characters in the story. They appear on screen in quiet, immobile scenes or during surreal dialogues when the other person does not answer but remains silent. The black-and-white depiction and references to the characters and films of the French new wave creates inevitable parallels with the cinema of the 1960s. Mireille looks just like Jean Seberg, and Alex is the embodiment of the romantic criminal Michel Poiccard. In this film and the next two, the actor Denis Lavant will become the alter ego of Leos Carax. The soundless loneliness of the characters and the hopelessness all around them point to the reality of Mitterand’s France, where there was no space for loud proclamations and great hope. The characters have more in common with the paradoxical heroes of the film Paris, Texas, released in the same year, or with the strange loners from Jim Jarmusch’s films a decade later, than with the dreamers of the 1960s. However, despite the strangeness and the total melancholy permeating Paris, boy does actually meet girl.
The film will be shown in French and English with Russian subtitles.
Boy Meets Girl
Director Leos Carax
France, 1984, 100 min.
16+