Boy Meets Girl (1984)
Directed by Leos Carax
In Paris at night, a young aspiring filmmaker grapples with heartbreak after his girlfriend leaves him for his best friend. After a failed attempt to confront his friend, he wanders the streets and encounters a girl who has just been abandoned. Their paths cross at a party, bringing together two tormented souls.
2 connections found
View:
2 connections, in both directions
What critics compared Boy Meets Girl to
Typical of its bustling bursts of setpieces, the film takes a fantastic leap in a scene following Frances running at top gait, leaping as the dancer that she is, through nighttime Chinatown streets, the laterally tracking camera fixing her as a succession of twenty-first-century Muybridge framings in motion, accompanied by David Bowie’s “Modern Love”—a thrill redoubled for those who have seen “Mauvais Sang (Bad Blood)” as well as “Boy Meets Girl,” Leos Carax’s black-and-white debut, also a short, bittersweet black-and-white song of apartments and city streets.
Carax, who made his debut in the 1980s with Boy Meets Girl, then fell suddenly out of favour after the wildly over-budget Lovers on the Bridge (1991) and a misunderstood critical failure, Pola X (1999), has not found it easy to get funding in recent years.
About a man: Although Holy Motors stars Denis Lavant, the simian, sinewy actor who played the lead in Carax's first three movies—Boy Meets Girl (1984), Bad Blood (1986), and The Lovers on the Bridge (1991)—it opens with the lanky writer-director himself.
From 1984's Boy Meets Girl and 1991's Les Amants du Pont-Neuf through his last film,1999's hugely divisive Pola X, Carax goes his own artful way with a talent that makes up its own rules.
Carax, 51, made the heralded Boy Meets Girl and Bad Blood by the time he was 25, then marked time with just two more features, The Lovers on the Bridge and Pola X, in his next quarter century.
A climatic zoom, framing Lavant and Perrier within a window, anticipates a similar shot near the end of "Holy Motors" almost thirty years later.
The 2013 New York Film Festival screened restored editions of these first two features to go along with Carax’s sensational Holy Motors, and now they’ve been transferred to disc.