Background
Leos Carax was born on 22 November 1960 in Paris.
Leos Carax was born on 22 November 1960 in Paris.
His first two films are the most ordinary or accessible, and they are vivid and compelling. Les Amants du Pont-Neuf is unforgettable, a monstrosity and yet a work of real fascination. It is also very moving, and shows a terrific use of Juliette Binoche. Pola X (which came after a significant interval) is a bizarre updating of Herman Melville’s Pierre, or the Ambiguities (“Pola" is actually an acronym on the French title—but, of course “Leos Carax” was an anagram of “Alex Oscar ”).
First of all, Carax is a great self-fabulist, something like a mixture of Tarantino and Godard of the sixties, thoroughly caught up in the melodrama of being a Great Moviemaker. To say that this is tiresome and self-defeating only raises the possibility that Carax is looking for some fulminating disaster. As it is, his best work is burning with a feeling for tragedy and apocalvpse. Even an admirer, Gavin Smith, speaking of Pola X, says that “his narrative and formal risk-taking are indistinguishable from failure.”
But it also alerts one to the way in which the ostensible passion in Carax—his best or worst quality, depending on your point of view—is actually rather calculated, or intellectual. And it is in the degree to which he seems conscious and self-conscious of being a modern enfant terrible that Carax might yet do his best work. So far, it seems, he is both insufferable and extraordinary— and that’s too rich a tradition among film directors for one to dismiss it.