Boy Meets Girl

Leos Carax, France 1985, 100 minutes

Boy Meets Girl features Carax in his first outing with long time collaborator Denis Lavant (also seen in Mauvais Sang and Les Amants du Pont Neuf).

The film begins with a young man (Lavant), just split up with his lover and about to leave as a conscript the following day, wandering the cold, lonely streets of Paris. The film is viewed as a cool neo-expressionist thriller (shot in black-and-white) and features some of the most stunning night scenes of Paris or of any other city. Carax shows himself a master of the camera, providing a display of visual design and rhythm directors three times his age would have died for (Carax was 22 years old when he made this film!).

Lavant, drifting round Paris, gatecrashes a party and meets an ageing actress, who is also running from an old love. The two (almost) connect at the party in a stark and revealing dialogue about the angst of the young and not so young.

The film is visually reminiscent of the early French new wave in the 1960s; its beautiful, evocative black and white scenery coexists with the energy and jumping camera work of the nouvelle vague. However, instead of seeming retrospective, Carax uses the imagery, scenes and settings to show a level of alienation and modernist abstraction made popular by authors such as William Gibson many years later.

Indeed, the profound darkness and minimalism of the scenery (reminiscent in some ways to cheeky old rascal, Ingmar Bergman) gives the characters an almost limitless bottom line of emotional depth as they discuss their troubles.

Beautiful to watch and a good taster of raw Carax (which would later bloom into his more highly acclaimed set pieces, Mauvais Song and Les Amants...) Boy meets Girl posesses an added vibrancy and rough edge one could say is lacking in his later films. Definitely well recommended.

Review by Stephen J Brennan
Taken from EUFS Programme 1997-98