Boy Meets Girl: Heights of Poetic Prowess review
Ankur Agarwal writes about Alex Carax's debut feature film, Boy Meets Girl
A debut feature film, and Carax achieves heights of poetic prowess: light and shadow, duty and love, soul and body, smile and destitution, David Bowie’s song and a couple fighting a bitter trivial battle in a neighboring apartment, yes all the clash is wrapped up, packaged in the story of self-search, of pain, of love that could never be between two people, victims of uptight, unimaginative, orderly people.
The story is simple: boy meets girl. It’s the same old pain with momentary relief, a flash of teeth of Mireille that Alex can induce with difficulty, and then the inevitable pathway towards love and doom continues. Lovingly shot in crisp black and white, the film opens with absurd: skis out of the windshield of a car. Nay, even before, there’s that voice, that old voice, which almost reminds me of another very uncanny opening of a totally different kind of film, Mackenna’s Gold, another masterpiece.
The film deliberates, thinks, stands on its feet too often, and lets you get sucked into it by this simple contrivance. Not hastily, but slowly, yet not in any order, the camera tracks the life-map of Alex behind the painting, and then today’s scrawl. Again, the father’s phone comes the next morning with a theatrical gravity and which strangely does not look uncalled for in this mockery of all ambitions, mannerisms and achievements compared to love — yes that’s what this film does convey.
We have the Einstenian and Armstrongish men, obsessed with themselves, or objects, when something far more beautiful is going on: Alex and Mireille. We have the hostess who says at an arm’s length “Je vous laisse” when Alex is nothing in answer to “Vous êtes qui?” And yet the same hostess treasures a loved one’s cup: is she sitting too long over one memory?
Should she have moved away? Is Alex any better for moving from girl to girl, a newer stab in his heart and life-map? Or has Alex finally met Mireille, who even if loin is of the same mauvais sang as Alex, the same dysfunctionality? Or are Alex and Mireille only extensions of the deaf and dumb man and her interpreter: the man has much to say but he cannot speak, the girl has voice but words of the old man since she has to interpret him, not herself? How much do we become extensions of the other when we love, how much should we become, and more importantly can we even determine this? Wouldn’t it be better in that case then to play pinball silently, with the electronic circuits doing all the noises? Occasionally the pinball machine will go wrong, and then we will correct the circuitry; occasionally the sex will go wrong and then we will ask how dry or wet we like it, or change our lover. Isn’t that simpler than love?
[Rating: 5/5]
Comments( 1 )
Boy Meets Girl, well, what to say,
Boy Meets Girl, well, what to say, beautiful, slow, reminded me of the languor takes of Jarmsuch and the way characters moved about. Yet, it’s so French. The party scene reminds me of the way French usually speak, beside how much Carax is indebted to Godard in his influence, but he takes them to a new heights and spirits: the superimposition, the distinction between sound and image, and the representation of the dead time of our lives: the pinball game. Even the party scene, echoes the movement of Ferdinand in the opening of Pierrot Le Fou, where he moves from one cut to the next, each with new shade of color and contextual references. Much like how Alex is shown around the party, and moves about.
Beside, Carax love for Godard just cannot be ignored while watching; even when Alex is going down to Florence flat, the whole ' sexual' narration is influenced from Weekend. But unlike Godard, Carax takes the basic technique and uses it splendidly in building and absence which is sexual titillating and, at the same, shows the realities of the clumsiness of sexual encounters- unlike perfected ones in Hollywood, but one can see a parallel visual presence in the films of Hong Sang Soo. He later did act in Godard's King Lear.
However, beneath all Carax mise-en-scene, the film is beautiful, not only visually thanks to the photography by Escoffer, the great man, after all, what Doyle was to WKW, he was to Carax.
Seriously, it was an outstanding debut from Carax, he single handedly resurrected French Cinema in the 80s along with Luc Besson and Jeunet. Not many people can achieve such a critical acclaim and success at an age of 23.
My favorite line from the film, perhaps, it spoke a lot about cinephilia:
Alex: I’m a cineaste.
Mirelle: Film or video she says
Alex: For now, I dream up of titles for the films I plan to make
And, even the whole idea to shot this scene extremely flat in a medium close, two-shot is remarkably memorable, It just flatten everything said or spoken, and even the emotions simply never enters in either of the characters- they just speak, to let their hearts out, that's all. To have shot wide, and then close, or move, would have just build things, but its the exemplary usage of form that makes his mise-en-scene stand out from the crowd, and no wonder he entered film arena as the Golden Boy of French Cinema.