Boy Meets Girl

I hadn't even been aware of this film when it was passed my way by a very kind fellow IMDb user. It is the debut feature by Leos Carax, a film he directed when he was only 24 years old. Like most of the other films in the cinéma du look movement, in which Carax was a key member, it's not very story-driven and instead favours strange plot tangents and a cool distance from its characters. The basic narrative tells a story of a depressed young man who meets a suicidal young woman after both of them have just suffered rejections from their respective partners. They enter a relationship of sorts.

It feels like Carax must have been influenced by the early 80's Francis Ford Coppola films One from the Heart (1981) and Rumble Fish (1983); like the former he often told simple romantic-drama stories in highly stylized cinematic ways and like the latter in Boy Meets Girl he has did it using crisp black and white photography. It is a very visual and typically left-of-centre approach that has been taken to the material. Unlike most films based around a romance, it takes an hour before the two title characters actually meet at an off-kilter party populated by eccentric characters. So much of the focus is really on other things with a number of little unusual vignettes making up the whole. Its story of young love and alienated youth isn't really a very uplifting one in fairness and could easily be described as a tragedy. Although it isn't necessarily as involving on an emotional level as it might be due to Carax style which always takes a somewhat removed perspective from his characters. I'm not entirely sure that this is the best approach for story-lines involving romance as these work best when you have more empathy and involvement with the characters in my opinion. But I still have to admire the look and feel of the film though which is pretty interesting for the most part. In addition, despite not having an actual score, there is interesting use of music, with a night-time sequence on the Pont Neuf bridge set to an obscure very early David Bowie track, while at another moment a character unexpectedly puts on the record 'Holiday in Cambodia' by the hard-core punk band the Dead Kennedys. These moments cement the fact that this was a film that resolutely celebrated popular culture. All-in-all, while it is not an entirely engaging experience this is a very confident film for a 24 year old novice film-maker to knock out.

Boy Meets Girl casts a recurring actor to play Alexandre, the protoganist who is the namesake of the young writer/director's real name, and Mireille as a cinematic version of herfself, the then girlfriend of director (pseudonym Leos Carax). This is an ingenious indie debut feature film with a flair for visual style (cinematography from Jean-Yves Escoffier) and beautiful use of black and white.

The.story is a love story but finds many ways to make it less dramatic and tragic with comedy, poetry and philosophy. The dialogues and monologues are crisp. Perhaps the greateat strenght of the.screenplay, yet the silent momemts, music and movement also conterbalance the heavy reflections on art, war, friendship, life and love.

A.gentle mix of video, music, dance, signing, poetry, metacognition and metaphysics with contemplative pacing and editing. Few films achieve this and eapecially om the first try for a film writer/director immense joy to watch. Expect European slower shots and French New Wave style if you are use the US constant drama and movement.

A film whose - very poetic - staging does not manage to hide the emptiness and the total neutrality of its action.

Aesthetically, Boy meets Girl, as a Leos Carax's very first film, has a lot of personnality, and this well-mastered daring is pleasing to see. The contrast of black and white is very well managed, along with the lighting of the film, we could see here a tribute to the expressionism era .

The photography is very well organized, the decorations, the compositions on the screen again testify to a certain stylistic audacity. Nevertheless, it flounders. This love story half-lived, or lived weakly, interspersed with impromptu lyrical outbursts in the dialogues hardly convinces. It does not work by its lack of fluidity, of coherence. The film itself breaks up between poetic softness and clumsy ardor, badly executed or badly played. The rambling of the young hero Alex is indeed the only constant line of the film, whose romance is difficult to discern, in a flood of poetic wanderings that end up plumbing the film. While Boy Meets Girl attracts lovers of poetry with its aesthetic, it puts off by its inconsistency and by the emptiness of its scenario.

There are so many same titles of this movie, so it was hard to find this one. This is a black and white movie. All movies of Leos Carax contain beautiful images of decadence. The way of expressing the emptiness of the young generation is one of a kind. Their conversations are always poetic so it hard to understand, same as usual. A variety of music stood out in this movie.

Visual treat as almost all Carax films. What a debut!

The protagonist Alex (Denis Lavant) rarely smiles. He does not drink or smoke. and makes films or wants to make them. The girl Mirielle (Mirielle Perrier) is extraordinarily attractive, if you discount her bad teeth in the film. The film has a sequence about a mute silent film crew member who jokes about what deaf people saw in silent films by lipreading that escaped normal people. The film has a brief shot tipping Carax's hat to Welles' "Citizen Kane." Both made their debut films at the same age of 24. Both wrote their original scripts

Denis Lavant has repeatedly worked for Carax, Mirielle Perrier again in Carax's Mauvais Sang.

The use of David Bowie's song "When I live my dream" (sung by Bowie). is a fascinating touch.

The visuals and the use of music and silences are a trademark of Carax. Lavant wears checked jacket and holds a scarf of of his previous love with the same design. When he is with Mirielle, the jacket is off andhis striped shirt matches the stripes of Mirielle's clothes.