Holy Motors - Credit: Wild Bunch Modern Love: The Films of Leos Carax August 9 to 15 The surprise art-house hit of the past year, Leos Carax's deliriously entertaining Holy Motors has reignited interest in the director's earlier workófour of the most personal and inventive films in contemporary French cinema, which receive their first screening in Toronto in over two decades in this rare retrospective.
Leos Carax's 1986 thriller Mauvais Sang takes place during a Parisian heatwave; in the most memorable scene, a hot-blooded young lover played by the elfin Denis Lavant runs crazily down a side street to the sounds of a hit David Bowie tune. The song is Modern Love, which is also the title that TIFF Bell Lightbox has given to its welcome retrospective of Carax's work.
While the 52-year-old director has only made five features to date, it's hardly a stretch to say that he's the master of cinematic amour fou. Starting with the title of his exhilarating debut, Boy Meets Girl (1984), Carax's great subject is romantic madness: in The Lovers on the Bridge (1991), a fire-eater and an artist paint the Seine red on Bastille Day; Pola X (1999), meanwhile, describes a semi-incestuous affair that consumes its participants whole.
Carax returned from a long hiatus with last year's acclaimed Holy Motors, a surreal sketch-comedy revue that dispenses with boy-meets-girl niceties and instead scrawls out a passionate mash note to the movies. Starring Lavant in 11 separate roles – or maybe just a single schizophrenic tour de force – it's a film about the elastic nature of performance that finds its director stretching and contorting himself right alongside his chameleonic lead actor. There may not be a more agile filmmaker out there.
Modern Love runs Aug. 9 to 13 at TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto.
Adam Nayman