Mr X (18.)
Directed by Tessa Louise Salome.
Featuring Leos Carax, Denis Lavant, Kylie Minogue, Eva Mendes and Harmony Korine.
Ah, the French: even their showbiz documentaries are designated as Un Film Des. This look at the life and career of the mysterious and elusive Mr Carax, an Un Film De Tessa Louise Salome, is both brisk and thorough, but rather longer on analysis than biography. Everybody chips in with an opinion and they are often illuminating but a little bit more information might have been nice. He's mysterious and elusive and the film allows him to stay that way.
Which is not unreasonable but can be frustrating when it comes to the career struggles he's endured. When it arrives at the making of Les Amants De Pont Neuf, the little love story that ballooned into an 110 million Franc (financial not artistic) catastrophe, we are told that people died and disappeared during its making and that “the detective novel about this film has yet to be written.” Then another commentator says that we've all heard the stories about people arriving on set with suitcases full of money, Carax taking a year to film a five-minute sequence and the storms that destroyed the sets and moves briskly on and I wanted to say No, stop, we haven't all heard them and googling it doesn't get you far, so why not tell us more?
But information is not really the film's business and, in all fairness, a lot of the talking heads are genuinely insightful. Serge Toubiana, the director of Cinematheque Francais says of Carax's way of quoting and harking back to the origins of cinema, “Nowadays, citation has the touch of cynicism as if we know everything and we can't be fooled. With Carax, it's the opposite. He plays the fool. He needs to experience something as if it were for the first time.” I don't think you can get a better encapsulation of what makes Carax special than that.
Leos Carax colection
Holy Motors
Directed by Tessa Louise Salome.
Featuring Leos Carax, Denis Lavant, Kylie Minogue, Eva Mendes and Harmony Korine.
Ah, the French: even their showbiz documentaries are designated as Un Film Des. This look at the life and career of the mysterious and elusive Mr Carax, an Un Film De Tessa Louise Salome, is both brisk and thorough, but rather longer on analysis than biography. Everybody chips in with an opinion and they are often illuminating but a little bit more information might have been nice. He's mysterious and elusive and the film allows him to stay that way.
Which is not unreasonable but can be frustrating when it comes to the career struggles he's endured. When it arrives at the making of Les Amants De Pont Neuf, the little love story that ballooned into an 110 million Franc (financial not artistic) catastrophe, we are told that people died and disappeared during its making and that “the detective novel about this film has yet to be written.” Then another commentator says that we've all heard the stories about people arriving on set with suitcases full of money, Carax taking a year to film a five-minute sequence and the storms that destroyed the sets and moves briskly on and I wanted to say No, stop, we haven't all heard them and googling it doesn't get you far, so why not tell us more?
But information is not really the film's business and, in all fairness, a lot of the talking heads are genuinely insightful. Serge Toubiana, the director of Cinematheque Francais says of Carax's way of quoting and harking back to the origins of cinema, “Nowadays, citation has the touch of cynicism as if we know everything and we can't be fooled. With Carax, it's the opposite. He plays the fool. He needs to experience something as if it were for the first time.” I don't think you can get a better encapsulation of what makes Carax special than that.
Leos Carax colection
Holy Motors
