Mauvais Sang (1986)
Directed by Leos Carax
Two aging crooks are given two weeks to repay a debt to a woman named The American. They recruit their recently deceased partner's son to help them break into a laboratory and steal the vaccine against STBO, a sexually transmitted disease that is sweeping the country. It's spread by having sex without emotional involvement, and most of its victims are teenagers who make love out of curiosity rather than commitment.
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What critics compared Mauvais Sang to
When the film overtly cribs from the style and storytelling devices of the French New Wave, it's not out of some bland, "I like the New Wave" impulse, but because that's an extremely useful touchstone for a story about insular young people (it does, however, hurt the film that its best moment is an out-of-nowhere direct copy of a scene from the much better neo-New Wave film Mauvais sang ).
Otherwise, Baumbach’s style could be called homage-happy: It’s classic Truffaut meets vintage Woody Allen meets Girls, with one direct lift—an exhilarating, freewheeling David Bowie-scored street dance—from Leos Carax’s Mauvais Sang.
The film shows many influences, from Woody Allen (white titles on black backgrounds, New York City shot in glorious black and white) to Leos Carax (Gerwig dances through the streets to David Bowie's 'Modern Love,' just like Denis Lavant in "Mauvais Sang").
Frances’s celebratory sprint through Manhattan, her speeding steps giving way gradually to outright pirouettes, is a remake of an identical set piece in Leos Carax’s Mauvais Sang (1986), only with the camera moving in the opposite direction.
One sprint lovingly lifts from Leos Carax’s delirious tracking-shot trot in 1986‘s Mauvais Sang, same-tuned to Bowie’s “Modern Love,” and there’s an obvious and joyful French fixation here, with music cues plucked from The 400 Blows and Contempt, among others (it’s wall-to-wall Georges Delerue, to the happy sigh of Francophiles everywhere), and a matte-gray palette piped in from the French New Wave.
Just like Denis Lavant in Leos Carax's Mauvais Sang.
There are still clear references—one shot of Simon walking along a ridged, blue-painted wall recalls the “Modern Love” sequence of Mauvais Sang—but here he starts to come into his own as a filmmaker.
Nos comparte su gozo por medio de una citación que ya era una citación: Jo corre por las calles de Nueva York como Frances (Greta Gerwig) en Frances Ha (2012) de Noah Baumbach, como Alex (Denis Lavant) lo hizo en el París de Mala sangre (Mauvais sang, 1986).
I love the long scene where Alana and Gary are running towards each other from opposite ends of the screen and the city--like something out of Leos Carax's Mauvais Sang , for instance, another film that is like this except all the way through, because it somehow resists shitting the bed with a gag that is hateful and sadly unnecessary.
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He’s a key figure in the so-called Cinéma du look, a term coined by critic Raphaël Bassan in 1989 to describe the spectacular visual stylings of movies like Leos Carax’s Mauvais Sang and Besson’s Subway.