Adam Driver must have the best agent in the world. Or at least the best taste.
The list of filmmakers he has worked with in the last decade reads like a cross-generational dream team: Clint Eastwood, Steven Spielberg, Ridley Scott (twice), Spike lee, Jim Jarmusch, Gretta Gerwig, Noah Baumbach (four times), the Coen brothers, Terry Gilliam and Michael Mann.
And then there was Carax.
In 2020, the rock opera Annette introduced the witty and arty pop duo Sparks to a whole new generation coming out of COVID. French director Leos Carax told this musical tale of tortured love like no other filmmaker could. It's kind of his specialty. The only thing missing was Mr. Merde (I’ll come back to him in a minute).
Carax was originally part of the 'Cinema du look’ wave of directors, along with the likes of Luc Besson (Nikita) and Jean-Jacques Beineix (Betty Blue) who emerged from French cinema in the 1980s. Originally used as a dismissive term by French critics, the ‘Cinema du look’ label stuck to describe these emerging visualists, whose movies broke out internationally.
Carax then kind of disappeared again following the release of his magnum opus, 1990's Les Amants du Pont Neuf in 1991. As I’ve written before, this is a film that changed my life, literally propelling me like a firework to the other side of the planet in search of all that matters: love, of course. This hugely cinematic and emotionally epic film changed Carax's life too, when its fractured three-year production was ultimately greeted by French critics and audience with something akin to hostility.
His first feature films, the sweetly poetic, black & white, New Wave-flavoured Boy Meets Girl in 1984 (made when he was just 24), and especially Mauvais Sang in 1986, with Julliette Binoche, landed with audiences across France. The latter, a heist film with a twist, set in a world where an AIDS-like virus spreads when anyone has sex without being in love, got him noticed internationally. Visually inventive and often very funny, (I actually remember Barry Norman reviewing this on the BBC for its UK release), both films star the unforgettable Denis Lavant, his circus-trained leading man - the De Niro to Carax’s Scorsese.
Following the failure of Les Amants du Pont Neuf in France (with the pace of distribution back then, it continued to play for years across the world), it would be nine years before Carax produced another feature. With a change in style, Pola X, his uncompromising adaptation of a Herman Mellville novel, came out in 1999, starring the late Guillaume Depardieu and Catherine Deneuve.
Sticking to making shorts for portmanteau films (like 2008's Tokyo!) with his cinematic surrogate, Denis Levant, for a number of years after, the duo invented what was to become a recurring character in his work going forward: the Chaplin/Keaton-like, Mr. Merde.
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Mr. Merde went on to crash the Cannes Film Festival in 2012 at the wheel of a stretched limo. Holy Motors, a surrealist fantasy based around a Parisian limo rental company, featured Carax himself, Lavant, Eva Mendes, Kylie Minogue and French cinema legends, Edith Scobe (Eyes Without a Face) and Michel Piccoli (Belle de Jour) - wowed festival audiences and landed Carax a nomination for the Palme D'or.
Made for a couple of million Euro plus a bunch of French tax credits, Holy Motors was a reaction to five years of frustration spent trying to raise money for a big English language movie. The picture ended up on dozens of top ten films lists, resulting in Hollywood taking notice. Especially actors. They all wanted to work with this visual genius born of ‘Cinema du look’. Michelle Williams and Rooney Mara, among others, were in the running for Carax's collaboration with his new friends, Sparks, and their proposed musical fable. Ultimately, it was Marion Cotillard who landed the female lead due to the wait for Adam Driver to fulfill his Star Wars obligations.
on the red carpet at Cannes in 2021 (Puic: Getty)
And so Annette was finally born in 2021, winning Carax best director at Cannes, a rake of French Cesars, a Golden Globe nomination for Cotillard, and delivering the best movie song of the year (a robbed Oscar nom, in my book) for the infectious So May We Start.
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Leos Carax is only getting started. A new film starring Mr. Merde is already in the can for Cannes 2024. In the meantime, he is the guest of honour at the Irish Film Institute’s annual French Film Festival, where he will introduce screenings and do Q&As for Boy Meets Girl, a new 4K restoration of his first Juliette Binoche collaboration, Mauvais Sang, and the award-winning (and incomparable) Holy Motors. Don't miss the chance to see these mad masterworks of cinema where they belong, and to meet their maker.
The French Film Festival runs at the Irish Film Institute from November 15th - 26th - find out more here.
