‘It’s Not Me’ Review: Leos Carax’s Personal Manifesto

After Jean-Luc Godard, Leos Carax might be the French filmmaker most related to the time period enfant horrible. In some methods, he’s been much more horrible than Godard ever was, adopting a pseudonym (he was born Alex Dupont) as a youngster and bursting onto the scene at age 24 with Boy Meets Lady — Godard made Breathless when he was 30 — which instantly turned him into a significant younger auteur to be reckoned with.

He adopted that up with the highly effective, AIDS-inspired Mauvais Sang, after which made The Lovers on the Bridge, a movie notorious for being a French Heaven’s Gate that went means over price range and flopped (it’s nonetheless a implausible film). After that Carax disappeared for some time, then reemerged to make a couple of shorts, compose pop songs and shoot a brand new function each decade, the final one being the Adam Driver-Marion Cotillard starrer, Annette.

His newest work, the medium-length, autobiographical collage It’s Not Me (C’est pas moi), is each that of an enfant horrible and a true-blooded Godard disciple. It mimics, or pays homage to, the late Franco-Swiss director’s montage movies like Histoire(s) du cinéma and The Picture Ebook, utilizing the identical colourful on-screen titles that JLG as soon as used to touch upon footage each previous and new.

That footage was assembled by Carax for an exhibition meant to occur on the Pompidou Heart a couple of years in the past, however nonetheless but to happen. (Again in 2006, Godard was requested to do his personal present on the identical museum, then deserted it as a result of “creative, monetary and technical difficulties,” solely to exchange it a number of months later with what was finest described as a “non-exhibition.“)

In preparation for the present, the organizers ask Carax a easy query: Who’re you? The reply, in line with It’s Not Me, it that he’s all the things from silent films to Hollywood Golden Age classics to scenes from his personal work. He’s additionally the music of Nina Simone and David Bowie and The Fall, in addition to Ravel and Beethoven. He’s Monsieur Merde (Mister Shit), a raving alter-ego performed by Denis Lavant, who’s starred in practically all of his movies. And he’s above all an individual who defines himself by way of the cinema, whether or not it’s the films he loves or these he’s made all through his turbulent profession.

Individuals unfamiliar with Carax’s oeuvre will probably be misplaced right here, whereas followers and cinephiles will discover a hearty meal to feast on. It’s Not Me is chock-full of references and influences, from F.W. Murnau to Jean Vigo to Godard himself, whose trembling voice is heard on a voice message he as soon as left the director.

There are additionally scenes that includes Carax’s actual household, together with his daughter, the actress Nastya Golubeva Carax, whom we see skipping alongside the Seine in previous cellphone footage, then marvelously taking part in piano in a scene illuminated by candles. The auteur himself seems a couple of occasions as nicely: on the very begin, the place he’s mendacity on one thing like his deathbed, and later strolling by way of the Buttes-Chaumont park accompanied by Monsieur Merde, who gleefully runs down a hill and defecates in a bush.

The movie jumps round so rapidly that it’s generally exhausting to comply with the director’s lead. At different moments Carax extra succinctly expresses his views, equivalent to in a rapid-fire montage of world leaders that teams collectively Putin, Trump, Kim Jong-il and Benjamin Netanyahu. One other scene supplies a quick historical past of Roman Polanski’s tumultuous and controversial life, in what looks as if a plea for his protection.

Whereas Carax’s films have by no means been overtly political or historic, this one makes a number of references to Hitler and the Nazis. In a single sequence, the director cuts in footage of Isadore Greenbaum, the Jewish plumber who tried to interrupt a pro-Nazi rally held at Madison Sq. Backyard in 1939. In a later scene staged by Carax — and shot by cinematographer Caroline Champetier, the DP of Holy Motors — a mom sits beside her youngsters in mattress, eerily studying a bedtime story that describes the Remaining Resolution.

Once more, it’s a hearty meal, and in addition a condensed one at solely 40 minutes. The auteur appears to be squeezing all the things he can into a private manifesto through which cinema, historical past and actual life grow to be interchangeable, and through which he tries to situate his work inside movie’s bigger trajectory. Probably the most telling proof of this can be a sequence which cuts from Eadweard Muybridge’s pioneering images of a horse in motion to a monitoring shot of Lavant gloriously operating and dancing down a Paris road in Mauvais Sang.

At such moments, it’s clear that Carax has not solely reserved his personal place in cinema’s trajectory, however that his movies stay immediately recognizable by way of their romantic exuberance and visible splendor, their darkish humor and existential gloom. These traits might not describe who Carax is or needs to be — if one is to consider that his newest film is just not, actually, him (c’est pas moi). However they’re what we all know and love about a fantastic filmmaker, and nonetheless very a lot an enfant horrible at age 63, who’s at all times put the entire of himself into his work.