Arts: The Return of Leos Carax

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Culturebox The Return of Leos Carax Holy Motors—one of the best movies of the year—will make you long for the movies the French auteur never made. By Elbert Ventura Posted Thursday, Oct 18, 2012, at 11:15 AM ET The savior of French film at 24, a has-been at 31, a wandering auteur now in his 50s, Leos Carax has had a career as convulsive and tragic as his movies. L'amour fou in all its forms has been his great subject, the ecstatic coup de cinéma his abiding aspiration. Has any working director conjured up more epiphanies in as few hours of running time? Strewn across his movies are slivers and set pieces that grasp for transcendence: swoony, love-soaked soliloquies, loopy digressions into the absurd, choreographed arias of pop bliss. But we should use the term "working director" advisedly. Since 1984, Carax has made five measly features, a victim of bad luck, bad publicity, busted budgets, and his own uncompromising sensibility. Now with Holy Motors, his first feature in more than a decade, Carax has made a spectral and dolorous movie about the worn-down artist in midlife, a project that he admits was born out of a decade of false starts. That it happens to be a visionary work—one of the best movies of the year—only makes us yearn for a filmography that never was. Jean Luc-Godard said that all you needed to make a movie is a girl and a gun. For his first movie, Carax didn't even bother with the gun. Boy Meets Girl (1984) was essentially a string of grace notes patched onto a wisp of a plot. In his first appearance as Carax's alter ego, Denis Lavant plays Alex ... To continue reading, click here. Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum What did you think of this article? POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES Also In Slate Stop Talking About Small Business and Income Tax Rates! The Drones Are Coming to Libya Should You Go to the Drugstore for Your Flu Shots?	Advertisement
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