Leos Carax x 3

Series Site

"If the Nouvelle Vague was film culture’s equivalent to the sea change of rock n’ roll, then Leos Carax, when he arrived on the scene, was the Sex Pistols—brash, brazen, and primally powerful, combining a grittiness that returned French cinema to the street level with an impassioned Romanticism that looked up to the stars. A shot in the arm to a national cinema that had begun too seem moribund before his Boy Meets Girl first appeared in 1984, Carax’s films remain models of exuberance and fireballing power. Decades earlier, Ballets Russes Serge Diaghilev had famously given the instructions “Astonish me!” to a young Jean Cocteau, who took this command as an artistic ethos—and it is Carax, more than almost any other figure in France, who has not only continued the poetic tradition of Cocteau, but pursued that imperative to astonish, always."—Metrograph