Leos Carax

Alex Christophe Dupont was born in Suresnes, Hauts-de-Seine, France, on November 22, 1960. The youngest of four siblings, his parents are journalists, he a scientist, and she a film critic at the International Herald Tribune. He would take the first name “Alex” and playing with the cinematographic “Oscar” that names many characters in his films, he would scramble the letters to create his stage name at the age of 16, “Leos Carax”, which he considered his second birth. Some have interpreted that “Leos Carax” can be read as “Le Oscar à x”, that is, “the Oscar is for…”, the classic award formula for the famous statuette.

He always loved movies, and developed a special admiration for Marilyn Monroe . He also loved music, and in fact as a teenager he used to steal records from a mall to resell them at his institute.

He began his university studies at the end of the seventies at the Parisian Jussieu where he met Serge Toubiana and Serge Deney, who introduced him to Cahiers de Cinéma, although his time at the brainy film magazine was brief, but with curious interventions, such as the un glowing commentary on Sylvester Stallone ‘s Hell’s Kitchen . Speaking of Jean-Luc Godard ‘s cinema and his way of shooting, he writes without ruffling his hair with the unapologetic audacity of his 19 years: “answers are sought, but only the beginnings of the questions are found.” The attempt to shoot a film with limited means, The dream girl, went to waste because of an accident, an unexpected fire. But in 1980 he was already able to show his first film work, already pierced with singular poetry, a short of little more than a quarter of an hour entitled Strangulation Blues , which will be awarded in Hyères.

His conversion into a cinephile sensation occurs in 1984 with Boy Meets Girl , which confirms his interest in artistically addressing the search for love in youth and the obstacles that stand in the way of lovers. Shot with remarkable sensitivity in black and white, it is an exciting reflection on the way in which love disappointments are produced. It is her first meeting with Denis Lavant .

Carax’s film delivery rate will be slow, it is not easy to find a way to finance his cinema. After making Bad Blood in 1986, a different story of thieves and love, with the veteran Michel Piccoli and a young Juliette Binoche , five years must pass before The Lovers of the Pont-Neuf arrive., a prodigy of sensitivity and assumption of aesthetic risks. My much appreciated Pedro Antonio Urbina rightly described it as “a true work of the seventh art”, highlighting the “dazzling magic of color and sound, creative, original, excessive…”. It excites how love is born and grows between the lovers who are united by the famous Parisian bridge, disinherited from Earth, vagabonds battered by life and incarnated by two old acquaintances of Carax, Lavant and Binoche. Despite being a cult title, the filming was very eventful, and only the support of filmmakers who recognized Carax’s talent, and even the French Minister of Culture Jack Lang, allowed the film to come to fruition.

The arrival of his new work, Pola X , from 1999, a dark and personal adaptation of a work by Herman Melville , with unexpected discoveries and twisted loves, is even more spaced out. Apart from delivering a film whose title rhymes with his last name, Carax demonstrates his status as a minority filmmaker who, however, has a good handful of followers who vibrate with his work. Despite everything, Pola X tastes like disappointment, perhaps The lovers of the Pont-Neuf had set their expectations too high.

So Carax’s next works are not feature films, he delivers two shorts and Carla Bruni ‘s music video clip “Tout le monde”, and above all the segment “Merde” from the Japanese film Tokio! (2007), where Michel Gondry and Bong Joon-ho also direct . Precisely the character of Merde will have a presence in the filmmaker’s latest work, the celebrated and groundbreaking Holy Motors , a reflection on cinematographic art and the alienated modern society, where people and the limousines that drive them would not be so different, mechanized beings, whirling around, assuming different identities without knowing who they really are.

Holy Motors is undoubtedly an original and groundbreaking film, but its aesthetic and transgressive audacity do not fail to divide opinions. Carax alludes to Kafkaesque influences and the cinema of Georges Franjuwhen it comes to showing characters with masks and the representations of which they are protagonists. The French artist has alluded to his difficulties in shooting what he would like in the following terms: “The film arose from the impotence of not being able to carry out various projects, all in another language and abroad. I always ran into the same obstacles: casting and money. Fed up with not being able to shoot, I was inspired by the experience of “Merde”, which was a Japanese commission. I commissioned myself a project with the same conditions, but in France: quickly conceive a film that is not too expensive for a previously chosen actor.” So he films in digital, another inconvenience -“All of this was also possible thanks to the use of digital cameras, which I despise (because they are imposed on us or imposed on us),Eva Mendes or the singer Kylie Minogue .

Holy Motors was unfairly ignored in the 2012 list of winners at Cannes, but that does not detract one iota from its value to a film that in the words of Carax is “a kind of science fiction, where men, beasts and machines are on the verge of extinction. ‘Sacred engines’, in solidarity, united by a common destiny, slaves to an increasingly virtual world. A world from which, little by little, the visible machines, the lived experiences, the action disappear.”