Mauvais Sang

1987 "Love that burns fast but lasts forever."
7.2| 1h59m| NR| en
Details

Two aging crooks are given two weeks to repay a debt to a woman named The American. They recruit their recently deceased partner's son to help them break into a laboratory and steal the vaccine against STBO, a sexually transmitted disease that is sweeping the country. It's spread by having sex without emotional involvement, and most of its victims are teenagers who make love out of curiosity rather than commitment.

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Reviews

Cortechba Overrated
Tetrady not as good as all the hype
Leoni Haney Yes, absolutely, there is fun to be had, as well as many, many things to go boom, all amid an atmospheric urban jungle.
Celia A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.
e-70733 Both the editing and the soundtrack display the avant-garde art idea of a young film maker. However, this slightly conservative story clearly does not support such a strong desire for expression. The mainly reason of current situation probably is that Leos Carax, the director of the film, didn't figure out how to expertly combine a commercial script with private style during that time. Therefore, though some independent parts is amazing and outstanding, the final result is somehow a bit out of control.
robert-temple-1 'By the time you finally learn how to live, it's too late.' This brilliant, bizarre, unique film is one more proof that Leos Carax is a genius. The film is so extreme in its technique and imagery that it can be placed in no category. Everything about it is original, even its derivative aspects. Carax is unconventional even when copying or echoing. Sometimes the film is so mannered and arch that it resembles a cartoon strip. But this is playfully misleading. At other times, the film is desperately emotional and heart-rending. It even has hyper-realistic close-ups of microscopic details. The lighting is crisp, hyper-real also. It is so hyper-real that it is utterly surreal. It is designed to oscillate between the real and the imagined constantly, at an ever increasing rate, in order to drive the viewer mad. Soon the viewer will be almost as insane as the director, or so the director hopes, and then the viewer will at last understand. One of the aims of the director is to reduce the viewer to pulp, but not just any pulp: he must be reduced to pulp fiction. Everything is a joke, but also everything is serious. Nothing has only one side to it. The heavily stylized approach is shown in every respect. The sets are carefully colour-coded, with red a major theme, appearing in ties and on walls, in velvet, in blood, often contrasted with black. There is a spectacular, manically exciting sequence where the young hero (Denis Lavant) impulsively runs down the street doing a spontaneous dance to a David Bowie song, and the camera tracks along beside him for a very long time. This kind of 'moving mania' (not unlike a totally berserk form of 'movie mania') has the restless and impassioned insistence upon constant motion that one sees in his next film, 'The Lovers of the Pont Neuf' with the speed boat on the Seine and the fireworks. In the story, also written by Carax, we have so much influence of Andre Breton's novel 'Nadja': love for the impossible woman who is obviously insane in her irresistibly fascinating way, chance encounters, the miraculous erupting in everyday life, impossible visions (when the hero first sees Juliette Binoche on a bus, but cannot make out her features properly through the glass, and yet knows that he loves her already because he 'feels' her). We have the impossibly beautiful Julie Delpy aged only 19, and already in her sixth film, with the unformed face of an infant, and yet her eyes deep pools of passion already, the eyes of a passionate child in that perfect Madonna face. Juliette Binoche is 22 but looks twelve, and her beauty is greater even than that of Delpy's, we cannot take our eyes off her, her calm is the calm of a lake when there is no wind, her face is the face of a lake with no clouds, her beauty is the beauty of a lake in the sunset, the sleekness of her movements is that of a fish glimpsed for a moment as it leaps above the surface of that lake. The story is purposely mocked by the film, its pretext of a thriller plot so absurd that we are encouraged to laugh, realizing there is no plot, there is only life. A virus is spreading: it is killing those who make love without loving, and the vaccine must be stolen. Such is the 'plot'. There are various inside jokes. The director himself plays 'the neighbourhood voyeur, who peeks through the window every night', a fine rebuke of the director against himself. Then there is an earnest conversation is a café where a hardened killer and gangster suddenly breaks off and insists that he sees Jean Cocteau on the other side of the room with his back turned, until he is reminded that Jean Cocteau is dead. There are many intensely stylized shots of the backs of heads. Features and faces are often masked: at one point, Binoche peeks through a hole she has torn in a paper napkin. In another scene, Delpy has a scarf stretched across her face below her eyes for the entire time. There is an interlude in the film in the middle of the night, when all the characters in the story are asleep. So of course, Carax being Carax, he shows them all sleeping in their respective beds in their respective abodes, just to let us see that side of them; the sinister American woman gangster ('the Americaine') has her lipstick all smudged as she lies unconscious, lost in her undoubtedly vicious dream. The young lead is called Alex, which is Carax's real first name (the name Leos Carax being an anagram, the man Leos Carax being an enigma, Alex Dupont being Leos Carax, this film being Alex Dupont being Leos Carax being a voyeur). Everything is original. It is true that some of it verges on farce, saved at the last minute by Carax's brilliance from jumping in front of the Metro just as a man does in the opening sequence. Carax is always about to throw himself and his film in front of the oncoming train. He is always about to throw his train in front of an oncoming film. He is always about to be serious, he is always serious. He is a daredevil. Just as his characters throw themselves into the sky from a plane, parachuting for no evident reason, with Binoche passing out before she can pull her ripcord but being saved by the hero who clutches her in his arms and pulls his for them both (we see shots of them looking down from inside the parachute, and how he filmed those I really cannot imagine), so Carax pulls his own ripcord over and over again, with every minute of the film, and saves it repeatedly from tumbling to earth, with the awe-inspiring audacity of his manic, uncontrollable creativity.
a_jodorowsky This is the best film in Love trilogy of Leos Carax. Leos Carax said he is always interested in Greek mythology. He successfully showed that Greek mythology in this film through a main character, Denis Lavant. He has the Oedipus complex about his father, but his father are killed by someone. And, father's friend looks for Alex to get a help for a crime. Also, he is falling in love with a mystery woman. However, she loves father's friend. Thus, he has the Oedipus complex about father's friend again even though his father died. And, he commits a crime with father's friend. This film shows fantastic images and perfect performance by Juliette Binoche, Denis Lavant and Michel Piccoli. The ending scene is unforgettable.
vostf On the whole this is typical artsy-fartsy film-making. Interesting visual ideas are clustered with mucho highbrow babbling so that you can brand it something like "post-modern cinema" to look cleverer than you are.Actually a bunch of visual ideas are much more interesting than the rest so it's not only the dialogue which spoils the art house soup. And that's why I won't hesitate in calling this pretentious auteur stuff: most images are just plain self-conscious (cleverly framed for art's sake - call it experimental cinema if you like, I say it's simply annoying), pseudo-poetical situations and lines (pure Godard-style) and a big inscrutable vacuum all over the place (plot construction is too vulgar a thing for artists to spoil their hands with it).Next time I'll try Ed Wood's Plan 9 from outer space. At least I won't laugh to forget how much I'm bored.