You have amazing scenes here. The energetic and nail biting heist scene, the sky-diving scene, and of course, the scene in which Chatterbox runs down the street to "Modern Love" by David Bowie. How shamelessly Noah Baumbauch stole this scene for Frances Ha, which compared to Mauvais Sang is a sophomore year, film school project. This is a master class in filmmaking. However, it's conversation scenes lag on for far too long, don't amount to much, and extend the run time of the film. It didn't need to be two hours.

I think music used throughout this reveals quite a bit of the cinematic exercise.Prokofiev's Roméo and Juliette, so a ballet, a cinematic opera on forbidden love between youth that aches to dream. Love that cannot be consummated in the ugly day of light and has to take to dreams, liebestod, Tristan and Isolde.Limelight tied into this, that precious bit of Chaplin beneath the big old sappy narratives that was purely evocative body, that was in essence a dance between innocence and star-crossed fate.David Bowie, 'Modern Love' aptly enough, so the rush of purely energetic instrumentation, dazzling camera beats, irony, New Wave atonality, in this case the song randomly caught on radio and meant to guide feelings, a dadaist gesture. Denis Lavant leaps across the frame with his wiry seething-petite frame that reminds a bit of the old silent comedians, he's a real pleasure to watch just move.In something like Beau Travail also with Lavant and operatic, space is arranged bodily, the whole thing is cinematic and flows. Not so here. The guy responsible for this wants to be a little like Godard, so we have the interminable recitations, the poetry, the deliberately crude crime plot where you only need a gun and a girl, always Godard's weaker spots.This too bad. Because there are visual moments here that left me practically giddy, for example love as a matter of leaping from a plane, a matter of joint flight and tenderly balancing mid-air.Instead we get a patchy, stuttery ride that only now and then blossoms into some internal scenery.The opportunity missed is that the eye dances but is not fully consumed with its musical capacity. Nouvelle Vague ruins this by proxy. I like to think that Wong Kar Wai saw this and immediately knew which parts worked.

On the whole this is typical artsy-fartsy film-making. Interesting visual ideas are clustered with mucho highbrow babbling so that you can brand it something like "post-modern cinema" to look cleverer than you are.Actually a bunch of visual ideas are much more interesting than the rest so it's not only the dialogue which spoils the art house soup. And that's why I won't hesitate in calling this pretentious auteur stuff: most images are just plain self-conscious (cleverly framed for art's sake - call it experimental cinema if you like, I say it's simply annoying), pseudo-poetical situations and lines (pure Godard-style) and a big inscrutable vacuum all over the place (plot construction is too vulgar a thing for artists to spoil their hands with it).Next time I'll try Ed Wood's Plan 9 from outer space. At least I won't laugh to forget how much I'm bored.

You will remember Mauvais Sang because of: - its unique & very recognizable director's style; - visual experiments that have broadened the cinema art horizon (please don't forget that this film was released in 1986 and was copied since then in many other films and videos, which makes it less experimental nowadays); - high energy level due to variation in static close-ups and dynamic scenes shot by the moving camera; - love story that touches but stays far away from clichés; - plot that plays with stereotypes of a gangster film and leaves enough space for your imagination.Visual ideas of Leos Carax can be encountered in, for instance, Romeo + Juliet by Buz Luhrmann, Delicatessen by Jeunet & Caro and a recent art house hit - Le Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain by Jean-Pierre Jeunet.