BOY MEETS GIRL Movie Review

Two lonely young people wander the dark streets, cafés, and clubs of a strange, other-worldly Paris. In the strangest of ways, they meet. That would be all, folks, except for the fact that this 1984 feature by France's Léos Carax is so visually suggestive and transporting that the black-and-white images take on a chilling, edgy life of their own. Paris has been imagined in countless ways on screen, but perhaps not since Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville has there been such an original and poetic vision of a city at night—and we're not talking digitally enhanced Gotham City stuff, either. Carax's camera can creep over a pinball machine as a desolate young man whaps robotically at the flippers and the image seems to have an electrically charged life of its own—it's completely familiar yet it's all strange, new, and eerie. The same can be said of the talent of this remarkable, yet-to-be-discovered-in-the U.S. director, whose equally astounding, big-budget Les Amants du Pont-Neuf has been seen here only at film festivals, but not (as of this writing) in theatres. Watch out for Léos Carax.

NEXT STOP … Les Amants du Pont-Neuf, Diva, The Devil, Probably

1984 100m/B FR Denis Lavant, Mireille Perrier, Carroll Brooks, Anna Baldaccini; D: Leos Carax; W: Leos Carax; C: Jean-Yves Escoffier; M: Jacques Pinault. VHS FCT, MGM