Boy Meets Girl (1984) Reviews

• "First Come Words, No Emotions"

  loganx-22009-10-18

  I had never heard of Leos Carax until his Merde segment in last years Tokyo, and his was easily the stand-out the film's three stories. It wasn't my favorite of the shorts, but it was the most unique, and the most iconic. "The Lovers on the Bridge" was the first of his full length features I've seen, a virtuoso romantic film that uses image and music to communicate an exuberant young love that overflows into the poetic. Though he's classified as a neo-nouvelle vogue, his films owe as much to silent cinema as the 60's experimental narratives. His movies are closer to Jean Vigo in "L'atlante", Jean Cocteau, and Guy Maddin, than Godard and Truffaut. In Boy Meets Girl Carax's 1984 debut he uses black and white and the heavy reliance on visual representation to display emotional states. He combines the exaggerated worlds of Maddin, but based in a reality that never seems quite stable like Cocteau, but by virtue of its expressions it becomes more accessible, emotional, and engaging like Vigo's movies. The story of Boy Meets Girl is simple, and similar to Carax's two following films which comprise this "Young lovers" trilogy. A boy named Alex played by Denis Lavant (who plays a character named Alex in Carax's next two movies), has just been dumped by his girlfriend who has fallen in love with his best friend. In the first scene he nearly kills his friend on a boardwalk but stops short of murder. He walks around reminded of her by sounds of his neighbors having sex, and daydreams of his girlfriend and best friend getting intimate. He steals records for her and leaves them at his friend's apartment, but avoids contacting either of them directly. He wanders around and finds his way to a party, where he meets a suicidal young woman, and the film becomes part "Breathless" and part "Limelight". Later he is advised by an old man with sign language to "speak up for yourself...young people today It's like they forgot how to talk." The old man gives an anecdote about working in the days of silent film, and how an actor timid off stage became a confident "lion" when in front of the camera. Heres where the movie tips its hand, but the overt reference to silent film is a crucial scene, since it overlaps the style of the film (silent and expressionist), with the content (a lovelorn young man trying to work up the courage to say and do the things he really wants to). Though Alex is pensive at first and a torrent of romantic words tumbling out of him by the end, he is the shy actor who becomes a lion thanks to the films magnification of his inward feelings which aren't easy to nail down from moment to moment, aside from a desire to fall in love. There is a scene in the film where Alex retreats from the party into a room where the guests have stashed their children and babies, all crying in a chorus that fills that room, until he turns on a tape of a children's show making them fall silent. Unexpectedly due a glitch the TV ends up playing a secret bathroom camera which reveals the hostess sobbing to herself into her wig about someone she misses. Even as Carax is self-reflexive and self deprecating of the very kind of angst ridden coming of age tale he is trying to tell (the room full of whining infants), he's mature enough to see through the initial irony to the lovelorn in everything the film crosses. Even the rich old, bell of the ball has a brother she misses. In another scene an ex astronaut stares at the moon he once walked on in his youth while sipping a cocktail in silence. Though indebted to films before talkies, Carax is a master of music, knowing when to pipe in the Dead Kennedy's "Holiday in Cambodia", or an early David Bowie song, the sounds of a man playing piano, or of a girl softly humming. In Boy Meets Girl, when someone gets their heart broken we see blood pour from their shirt, when a couple kiss on the sidewalk they spin 360 degrees as if attached to a carousel, when Alex enters a party an feels out of place, its because the most interesting people in the world really are in attendance; like the famous author who can't speak because of a bullet lodged in his brain, or the miss universe of 1950 standing just across from the astronaut. This film is the missing link between Jean Piere Jenuet, Michel Gondry, and Wes Anderson, whose stylistic flourishes and quirky tales of whimsy, all have a parallel with different visuals, musical, and emotional cues in these Carax movies. Every line of dialog, every piece of music and every effect and edit in this movie resonated with me on some emotional level, some I lack words to articulate. There are many tales of a boy meeting a girl, but rather than just explore the banal details of any particular event this movie captures the ecstatic truth of adolescent passion and disappointment. The other movies you want to watch can wait. See this first. If I were to make films, I would want them to be like this, in fact I wish all films were like this, where the ephemeral becomes larger than life, and life itself becomes a dream.

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• A striking ode to the bitter ironies of unrequited love, and alienated Parisian youth.

  ThreeSadTigers2008-01-08

  Leos Carax made a name for himself in the early-to-mid nineteen-eighties; emerging from the short-lived "cinema du look" movement with a pair of quirky and melancholic romantic fantasy films, Boy Meets Girl (1984) and Mauvais Sang (1986), before taking his central themes of unrequited love and alienated Parisian youth to the next conceivable level with the film Les Amants Du Pont-Neuf (1991). That particular film was supposed to be the one that would finally introduce Carax to a wider cinematic audience; finding the filmmaker refining his usual themes and structural preoccupations with a larger budget and much in the way of creative freedom. Sadly, things didn't go quite to plan; the eventual film - a wildly uneven though often quite captivating blend of romantic folly and violent social realism - went massively over-budget and over-schedule before finally limping out with a limited release almost half a decade later. As with the other filmmakers at the forefront of the cinema du look movement - Luc Besson and Jean Jacques Beineix - Carax's work is high on style and short on plot; often seeming like a collection of random scenes, linked by one or two reoccurring characters, that accumulate over the course of the film's duration to create a kind of whole. His approach to film-making is very much akin to Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai, in the sense that the film is created from a brief outline and then improvised in the same way that a sculptor or a painter will work, often impressionistically, until a form begins to take shape. Carax however doesn't quite have the narrative scope or the sense of control of someone like Wong, or indeed, the grand duke of improvisational cinema Mike Leigh; with many of his scenes feeling formless and disconnected while his characters remain vague and curiously unsympathetic throughout. These are the major flaws we encounter with Carax's work, and those who are unable to look past the loose structures and wandering approach to narrative will no doubt find much of the director's first two films completely unwatchable - which is a real shame, as despite this, they're both striking and unconventional examples of the cinema du look movement at its most disarming; mixing elements of the Nouvelle Vague with film noir, silent comedy, existentialism and references to early 80's pop culture. Boy Meets Girl (1984), Carax's first film, typifies this approach; taking the very essence of Jean-Paul Satre's La Nausée and filtering it through the lens of an early Jean-Luc Godard, to create a film that is both playful and romantic, but also lonely and entirely downbeat. The film was made when Carax was twenty-four years old and is very much the kind of film that a gloomy twenty-something loner would make; with its striking black and white cinematography, stylised performances, continual allusions to lost love and alienation and numerous scenes in which our hero wanders the streets as French pop and David Bowie filter in from near-by windows and onto the soundtrack. The film would announce Carax as the infant-terrible of the new French film scene, with his lead actor Denis Lavant becoming a sort of alter-ego type figure; re-appearing as different characters (but with the same name) in Boy Meets Girl, Mauvais Sang and Les Amants Du Pont-Neuf. He's also aided greatly by cinematographer Jean Yves Escoffier, whose use of long tracking shots, imaginative compositions and expressionistic lighting makes Boy Meets Girl one of the most visually stunning films of the 1980's; probably falling somewhere behind Lars von Trier's The Element of Crime and Coppola's One From the Heart. The problems with the film are mostly in the distance we have from the characters; never really getting the chance to know or care for them in a way that would be more beneficial to that ironically bleak and entirely unexpected climax. The basic plot of the film is loose and meandering; more a moody tone poem centring on a young man cast adrift, lonely and lost within the dark maze of a shimmering late night Paris. After having just split with his lover, the young man, Alex (Denis Lavant), wanders the streets desperate and depressed, eventually happening upon a party hosted by a rich American socialite that he decides to crash. There he meets a fellow lost soul who has also just left split from her lover, and the two begin a complex relationship that grants them a temporary reprieve from the cruelties of everyday existence. This covers at least 30% of the film's actual running time, with Carax padding things out further with lots of beautifully shot sequences of Alex brooding over his lost love and the emptiness of his young life, as well as additional vignettes seemingly unconnected to the central characters at hand that attempt to visually underpin the ideas of loss and love at the heart of the film itself. These sequences include an opening prologue in which a young mother parks her car by the side of the river and then, over the phone, tells her boyfriend that she is not only in the process of leaving him, but also plans on throwing his unpublished poems into the water. Another memorable sequence finds Alex wandering the streets, as Bowie's 'When I Live My Dream' plays on the soundtrack, and coldly observing a young couple kissing on the bridge, oblivious to his presence. After watching them for a short while, Alex throws a handful of loose change at their feet as if rewarding a street musician for a competent performance. This sequence is a key moment here, as it underpins both the film and Carax's feelings on love and its importance to everything that fits around it. There's also a charming scene in which Mireille (Mireille Perrier), the girl that Alex will later fall in love with, practices a tap dance routine in her one-room apartment, tapping (no pun!) into Carax's combined love for early silent cinema (specifically Chaplin) and Godard's Bande à part.

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• Leos Carax's premiere prime

  ruby_fff2000-10-08

  Leos Carax made his own stamp of filmic storytelling in Black and White with fascinating use of light and framing of imagery. Can't forget the frame with the 4-pane window shadow in a room with sparse furniture - so simply captured that the mood and tone is instantly felt. It's practically a piece of art just looking at that frame in that moment in time: before Alex opens the door coming in, and once again when he leaves us to this arresting image on screen. Carax's style of telling his dramatic stories does border on melodramatic touches. This 1984 "Boy Meets Girl", his first feature film, showed us his poignant understanding of the younger set in love. The emotional entanglements and angst - struggling to be loved by the one you want the love from and disappointment awaits. Such a common premise is dealt in an uncommon insightful depiction, with graphically framed imageries. The ending demonstrates his use of subtle yet telling visual approach, letting the audience know what's really going on without words uttered. Come to think of it, that's how he ended his films - the strength of soundless or non-dialog scenes tells it all impressively. It's certainly not your usual teen angst movie - Carax's films are not simple by any means. Emotional layers, love in conflict and flight are ever present. Regular street scenes and night shots by the river with lighted bridge afar are his common backdrops. Discourses on love and relationships you will find. If you like to go steps further and really plunge into French conversations of love, sex, and relationships, try Jean Eustache's 1973 "The Mother and the Whore" (La Maman et la putain; NFE = not for everyone), also shot in B/W. Let Jean-Pierre Leaud's Alexandre lead you through the 3 hrs. 30 mins. verbal journey, with Bernadette Lafont as Marie "la maman", and Francoise Lebrun as Veronika "la putain".

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• Strong first feature from a great filmmaker

  che-291999-11-02

  'Boy Meets Girl ' was Leos Carax's first movie, and is remarkably mature for a first film!! Leos went on to tell a similar story in his next films. One of the great things about this film is that it reminds me of the glory days of the French New Wave, because it's fresh and has a new way of telling us something we may have heard before.The best thing is that the film has several great visual sequences that prove Carax has the ability to express things visually that alot of directors could only accomplish by using words. It's hard to track this one down, but if you get a chance make sure you see it. Then see the rest of Leos Carax's movies, one of the most visionary directors at work in the contemporary film scene.

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• High concept and premise but pacing a bit dreary

  nini_ten2004-05-24

  The great things Carax does is let his characters dance in the fashion of the most organic of cinema or "Band a part", which relates to his great ability to create moments of someone(in/out of the movie)experiencing exuberance and ecstasy(through movement, sound, image). His casting choices are close to inspired and his writing is always in wild impulses to express the frets and agonies of love, whereas his characters can be hyperactively on the chase for love or perversely wounded, letting us do the guessing whether the character will live on hope or not. There are so many memorable images in the film, the boy's minimalist apartment, him walking with the Bowie song,the girl's conceptual loungy flat, the neo-Marienbaud inspired party scene, and Alex walking into the coffee shop where Asian businessmen were playing the pin ball machine. Also, the structure of the film is amusing, ponderous though, but recalls A bout de souffle's way of telling a story, but we could tell Carax is doing it his own way. The characteristic of the boy liking to drink milk is an eccentricity I've seen before in other movies like Leon. The ending wasn't entirely engaging, but someone could vaguely tell it was necessary for a suprise to be in store for the end, although the pacing was a bit dreary to wait for it, overall the story wasn't exactly satisfying or engaging enough, but nonetheless crafted beautifully with moments to call its own.

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