The Cinematheque

New Restoration

“Visually exuberant, Mauvais sang blows most contemporary movies from any culture out of the water.”

Katherine Dieckmann, Village Voice

Leos Carax described his eagerly anticipated follow-up to Boy Meets Girl as ​“a film which loves cinema but which does not love the cinema of today.” Part love story and part thriller, Mauvais sang (named after the poem by Rimbaud) is a dazzling, ultra-stylish homage to silent cinema and to early Godard. Something of an Alphaville for the AIDS era, it is set in a Paris of the near future, and concerns a plot to steal the only antidote to STBO, a deadly virus spread by ​“making love to those you don’t love.” Denis Lavant is Alex, a footloose petty thief drawn into the caper by Marc (Michel Piccoli), an old gangster friend of his dead father. Juliette Binoche (in a César Award-nominated performance) is Anne, the object of Alex’s desire. Much celebrated is the exhilarating sequence in which a smitten Alex prances and dances down the street, tracked by Carax’s sprinting camera, to the strains of David Bowie’s ​“Modern Love.”

In French with English subtitles

“A masterpiece of ecstatic cinema … An emotional world akin to that of the New Wave masters, a visual vocabulary that pays tribute to their later works, and a visionary sensibility that owes much to Jean Cocteau’s fantasies.”

Richard Brody, The New Yorker

“Finds [Carax] at the height of his lovesick powers … The film is almost single-mindedly focused on cinema’s capacity to render affect with an immediacy and sensuality possible only through montage … There would be several fascinating films maudits and comebacks in the years to come, but this one remains the most lovable.”

Dan Sullivan, Film Comment

“It’s an announcement: Carax and Lavant are here, a cinematic force to be reckoned with … As romantic as movies get.”

Jeff Reichert, Reverse Shot