Mauvais Sang (1987)

Horrible, fascist and poorly acted

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

Both the editing and the soundtrack display the avant-garde art idea of a young film maker. However, this slightly conservative story clearly does not support such a strong desire for expression. The mainly reason of current situation probably is that Leos Carax, the director of the film, didn't figure out how to expertly combine a commercial script with private style during that time. Therefore, though some independent parts is amazing and outstanding, the final result is somehow a bit out of control.

Taking part in a French challenge event on ICM,I started trying to decide what the final film to watch would be. Seeing auteur Leos Carax's Boy Meets Girl and The Lovers on the Bridge during my own 100 days/100 French films last year,I decided that it was the perfect time to find out the age of the night.The plot:After the death of his dad,Alex is hired by his dad's old friends/fellow gangsters Marc and Hans to steal the only known created cure to a sexual virus. Leaving his girlfriend Lise,Alex joins up to prepare for the task. Staying at Marc's place,Alex meets Marc's young lover Anna. Soon falling in love for Anna,Alex starts pushing his mission to steal the cure aside,in order to focus on his new mission of getting Anna from Marc.View on the film:Joining the movement after it was established by Jean-Jacques Beineix's 1981 Diva,writer/directing auteur Leos Carax (who also has a cameo) & cinematographer Jean-Yves Escoffier fully embrace the stylisation of Cinema du Look. Caught in the middle of the lo-fi Boy Meets Girl and the blockbuster Lovers on the Bridge,Carax begins to expand on his major themes,with Girl's David Bowie tunes and rustic,crisp black and white overlapping images following Alex on the robbery. Lining the walls surrounding Alex and Anna in decadent wall paper,Carax drinks up his first colour film with ravishing Cinema du Look bright greens,blues,reds and neon yellow being splashed across the screen. Gliding along the colours,Carax and Escoffier unleash hyper-stylised camera moves such as extended tracking shots with razor sharp jump- cuts that give the tale a Sci- Fi atmosphere.Starting as a hired hand heist mission,the screenplay by Carax uses Anna's feeling for the older Marc to draw Alex as the young Cinema du Look loner. Displaying an impressive level of ambition,Carax builds on his troubled young romance theme with an off-beat Sci-Fi twist. Whilst not going into too much detail over how the virus was created,Carax spins the Sci-Fi elements to give an urgency to Alex's love for Anna. Made before she went to Hollywood, Julie Delpy gives an enticing,siren call as Lise,while Juliette Binoche gives Anna a fittingly quirky attitude. Playing an "Alex" for the 2nd of 3 times in Carax's work, Denis Lavant gives a great performance,which finely balances Alex's slight cockiness with a sweet,romantic naivety,that reveals itself to Anna as the night gets old.

A few years ago, I came across a PAL VHS copy of Leos Carax's debut feature, BOY MEETS GIRL (1984), and now that I've caught up with the rest of his filmography, I regret passing on it...! BAD BLOOD promises to be several things – a treatise on a society coming to its first realization of the ravages of a sexually-transmitted disease (read AIDS), a caper movie involving the stealing of a highly-requested anti-"AIDS" serum, etc. – but ends up being a romantic love story and a vintage Hollywood pastiche of sorts: Carax admitted in an interview that the film was inspired by the Alan Ladd/Raoul Walsh actioner, SALTY O' ROURKE (1945)! The film has a good mix of veteran (Michel Piccoli and Serge Reggiani) and upcoming talent (Juliette Binoche and Julie Delpy) but the main character is played by Denis Levant; curiously enough, he dies in this one but in Carax's following movie, THE LOVERS OF THE BRIDGE (1991; also with Levant and Binoche), the main character sports the same name of the one Levant plays here and, as a matter of fact, Binoche also makes references to Julien and Marion who also "feature" in LOVERS!! Actually, it appears that Carax's first 3 features are supposed to be taken as a loose trilogy.While BAD BLOOD isn't a total success, it is occasionally quite inspired: when David Bowie's "Modern Love" blurts out from the radio, Levant goes out dancing in the streets (pun intended) but his exuberant dance routine is soon cut short when Binoche turns off the radio; a completely irrelevant sepia-tinged sequence of a gamine and her little child is set to the strains of Charlie Chaplin's score from THE KID (1921); Piccoli and Reggiani's first meeting in an airfield becomes a pantomime routine akin to Silent slapstick comedies; and, most hilariously, an American thug also after the serum mistakes a fellow diner in a restaurant for Jean Cocteau but when Levant tells him that Cocteau is dead, he deadpans: "No…look..he's moving!".

This is the best film in Love trilogy of Leos Carax. Leos Carax said he is always interested in Greek mythology. He successfully showed that Greek mythology in this film through a main character, Denis Lavant. He has the Oedipus complex about his father, but his father are killed by someone. And, father's friend looks for Alex to get a help for a crime. Also, he is falling in love with a mystery woman. However, she loves father's friend. Thus, he has the Oedipus complex about father's friend again even though his father died. And, he commits a crime with father's friend. This film shows fantastic images and perfect performance by Juliette Binoche, Denis Lavant and Michel Piccoli. The ending scene is unforgettable.