Advertisement

Sympathy for the Troll

Janus Films

Leos Carax in his film It’s Not Me, 2024

During the Q&A after the US premiere of Leos Carax’s It’s Not Me, last fall at the New York Film Festival, someone asked about his interest in shit. The provocation was not altogether inappropriate: Carax’s forty-two-minute essay film begins, after all, with Monsieur Merde, a recurring character in three of his last four major films. With overgrown nails and the fiery beard of an unshowered leprechaun, Merde moves like a wind-up doll—or like a silent film undercranked—flat-footing through the streets of Paris and the sewers of Tokyo at what seems like more than twenty-four frames per second. 

Acted—or, better, animated—by the preternaturally embodied Denis Lavant, with whom Carax has collaborated since 1984, Merde is a compact spectacle. He slakes his horny appetite with mouthfuls of flowers, licks armpits, abducts models, and generally explodes with unsublimated desire. He says nothing and yet transmits the whole history of cinema—he is Chaplin’s tramp, Renoir’s Hyde, with shocks of Nosferatu and Kong—through coos and shrieks, speaking most forcefully through a single feverish eye. The other eye is clouded over, cataracted, his vision of the world as warped as the director’s own.

But Carax didn’t answer the audience member’s question with Merde or Lavant. He made no mention of Tokyo! (2008) or Holy Motors (2012)two of his films in which Merde wreaks random havoc, nor of the scene in It’s Not Me in which Merde, bare-bottomed, perches on all fours in the Parc des Buttes Chaumont, as if to howl at the moon, before letting out a constipated mewl. “This film is about I don’t know what,” Carax said instead. “There are masters in cinema—Hitchcock, Robert Bresson. They know exactly what they’re doing. I wish I was a master, I’m not. I don’t know what I’m doing.” 

The reply only makes a certain amount of sense—is more than a throat-clearing demurral or a statement of false modesty—if you substitute “master” for “modernist.” If you submit, that is, to a particular French ideology of cinematic greatness that celebrates a lineage of auteurs from Renoir to Bresson to Hitchcock, often culminating in the director with whom Carax has been most frequently compared, and who is everywhere present in It’s Not Me: Jean-Luc Godard. Some were naturalists; some were Brechtian; some were maestros of the storyboard; others remained faithful to the spontaneity of improvised action. But what unites their work under the twin banners of modernism and auteurism isn’t only their virtuosity. It is their ability, as determined most influentially by the critics at Cahiers du Cinema in the 1950s, to develop cinema as an art form according to their unique signatures. They advanced, through the singularity of their vision, what the Cahiers cofounder André Bazin called cinema’s “greater personalization.”

Pierre Grise Productions/Entertainment Pictures/Alamy Stock Photo

Denis Lavant as Monsieur Merde in Leos Carax’s Holy Motors, 2012

It wouldn’t be unfair to call Carax a postmodernist emerging from this tradition: a filmmaker who repudiates his authoritative vision and resolves instead to double down on dilettantism. Call your own work shit; insist, almost petulantly, that it couldn’t be otherwise: the masters are dead…Hélas. Carax both is and isn’t committed to this brand of sulky resignation because commitment is his conundrum. His ostentatiously intelligent films, hypermediated by film history, are all in frantic search of a worldview to adopt. Instead of claiming one as his own, he answers the charge of “greater personalization” with self-effacement, a commitment to noncommitment, and a stylized sigh. 

*

It’s with a sigh of this sort that It’s Not Me really begins. At the very start of the film, just before introducing Merde in a clip pulled from Tokyo!, Carax exhales, exhausted, into a microphone and explains that the project originated as a response to a question from the Centre Pompidou: “Where are you at, Leos Carax?” “Me? Thank you for your question,” Carax answers in a gravelly voiceover, his audio track playing over primary-colored, sans serif intertitles that read: PAS MOI…C’EST PAS MOI…MERDE. 

Followers of Godard’s late work will recognize these stylistic choices—from the cadence of the voiceover to the specific typeface of the onscreen text—as echoes of Histoire(s) du cinema, the eight-part video essay that he made between 1988 and 1998. For Carax to so conspicuously adopt these motifs seems almost like thumb-nosing, as if his response to the Pompidou’s request—and the cult of authorship that it implied—were really and merely: It’s not me (you want), it’s Godard. Carax pulled the submission and continued working on the film for more than eighteen months. The result isn’t, ultimately, ersatz Godard, even as he circles the themes that Godard developed—yes, masterfully—in the second half of his career: the nature of cinema after celluloid, its origins in spectacle, its imbrication in the violence of two world wars, and its seamless passage into twenty-first century flows of capital and ethnonationalist sentiment. 

Advertisement

“I don’t know,” Carax’s voiceover continues, still in facetious response to the Pompidou prompt, “but if I knew, I’d answer that—” The rest of the film is held in this subjunctive abeyance, a series of nonnarrative vignettes comprised of home movies, stills, and clips from Carax’s own films and those he frequently cites. It’s a histoire du cinema and the self-portrait of an artist predicated on the fiction of the self. Authenticity is displaced by pastiche; authorship is recast as a theater of influence. “Here is my father,” Carax rasps over stock footage of spectators gawking at JFK’s funeral procession. Men stroll in and out of the image’s foreground. “No, not him…him!” The image changes and changes again—it’s a still from King Vidor’s The Crowd (2018), a painting of Dostoevsky—and Carax’s voiceover proceeds. “Yes, that’s him!…No, not there…There!” Now it’s Shostakovich. Now it’s Céline. “No, not him…Him!” The image lands on Hitler. 

Less than five minutes into It’s Not Me, Carax has restaged the generational drama between modernist masters and postmodernist trolls that determined the reception of his earliest work. His first three feature films, released between 1984 and 1991, earned him, along with his contemporaries Luc Besson and Jean-Jacques Beineix, unholy canonization as an enfant terrible, a shit-stirrer, a Merde. Collectively the trio’s films were christened cinema du look, an epithet whose Americanized “look” (as opposed to the sustained French regard) is precisely as derogatory as it seems. Rife with commercial images and ironic quotations of great directors, their films drew constant comparison to music videos and advertising. “Too hip to be sincere,” they “corrupted the art of their elders with impunity,” the critic Raphaël Bassan wrote, summarizing the generational grievance in an essay that consolidated their brand even as it argued their defense.

In truth the label was never a perfect fit for Carax, who has since far outgrown it. But It’s Not Me returns to the premises of that debate—the impossibility of authentic self-presence, the burden of inheritance, and above all the fraught status of looking in an image culture that makes early MTV seem rather quaint. As if rehearsing the ungenerous assessments of his early critics, Carax shamelessly positions himself as “no master” and Godard’s epigone, snatching at the slantwise crown (Vive le postmodernisme! Vive l’enfant terrible!) that critics no longer require him to wear—insisting, all over again, on his own incompetence. 

But this juvenile posture isn’t a mask that Carax hides behind. Instead, in It’s Not Me, it’s a self-consciously crafted backdrop for a new history of cinema: a history of shallow men and, as one intertitle reads, BAD DADS. “It tries to say a few things about men as children,” Carax said of the film at the end of his reply to the audience member’s question. “The immaturity of men, which seems a big problem. Myself included, of course. So the shit aspect is to talk about this regression.”

*

It’s tempting to write a history of anything as a history of bad dads. The history of art, the history of war, capitalism, and love: mauvais pères all the way down, a cycle that can’t seem to be broken. But Carax turns this quasi-Freudian self-exoneration—It’s not me, it’s my bad dad—into a self-implicating statement of purpose. Before he made his first film, Leos Carax changed his name. Born Alex Christophe Dupont in 1960 to a French journalist father and an American film critic mother of Russian Jewish origin, he has been disclaiming patrilineage, while making its onus his perpetual theme, since his first feature films, Boy Meets Girl (1984), Bad Blood (1986), and The Lovers on the Bridge (1991). 

The protagonists of these movies, all played by Lavant, have dead dads, bad dads, or both. They are angry, aimless teenagers with low centers of gravity who can nonetheless take flight, pulled off their feet by a David Bowie soundtrack or the piercing look of a wide-eyed gamine. Loose stand-ins for Carax (they are all named Alex), they are bohemian, white, and heterosexual; they all want to speak truth to power, but they have little to say and no proper arena in which to say it. This lack of anything-to-say isn’t for want of thought. They are often reading and always daydreaming, but their reticence, like their recalcitrance, seems to be congenital.

Advertisement

After a hiatus from filmmaking upon the release of his critically divisive Pola X (1999), and after having had a child of his own, Carax returned to the problem of bad dads from the other side. Holy Motors features Lavant as an actor, passing magisterially from role to role in the course of a single day, whittling away at his ego and, in the process, eroding any distinction between acting as Merde—or as an assassin, or a CGI superhero—and acting as a father. Each seems to demand unreasonable physical and emotional exertion; each is self-estranging and above all a drag. Annette (2021), Carax’s only English-language film, casts Adam Driver in the role of bad dad. He’s a stand-up comedian who exploits his daughter’s otherworldly singing talents for financial gain, taking her on tour, making her into a spectacle to compensate for his own waning celebrity. 

What lies behind this fixation on abject or absent father figures? “Originally,” Carax told the critic and filmmaker Kent Jones in 2000, “we think we come from a man and a woman. But then we grow up, we find out we come from much more history than that.” Like his early protagonists, Carax belongs to the generation that arrived at adolescence late to the party of cinematic modernism and its distinctly French esprit de corps—just as it arrived late to May ’68, during which that same French spirit could have been channeled on behalf of liberté, égalité, and fraternité for students and workers alike. Mao said the revolution was not a party, but you might be forgiven for thinking it was if you were never invited in the first place.

Cinematic/Alamy Stock Photo

Juliette Binoche as Anna and Denis Lavant as Alex in Leos Carax’s Bad Blood, 1986

The young Carax grew up on the films of the French New Wave and the criticism that circulated alongside them, in which modernism and radical politics were inextricably linked. The terms of their connection are efficiently glossed in Godard’s La Chinoise (1967), when the student Kirilov (Lex De Bruijn) gives a lecture on revolutionary aesthetics: “Art doesn’t reproduce the visible. It makes visible,” he says. Art “doesn’t reflect reality. It is the reality of the reflection.” Cinema, in other words, doesn’t reproduce politics in images; it constitutes the very grounds of political possibility. Godard’s films of the 1960s and 1970s set the blueprint for this art. They used formal experimentation to disrupt the visual coordinates of common sense, whether by treating gaps, elisions, and digressions as foundational narrative principles or by diverting their own fictional conceits via intertitles, direct-address, and various musings on the conditions of their own production. This was a counter-cinema intended to produce a counterpoint to the bourgeois point of view. 

What a time to be an artist! But Carax wasn’t yet one. Bequeathed a failed revolution—and bombarded with cheery rhetoric heralding technological and economic progress—he and his peers of Generation Mitterrand entered adulthood under an emergent neoliberalism. The heterosexual white men among them also had a more specific anxiety to contend with: the social revolutions of the 1960s had recast their identities as particular forms of privilege rather than unmarked grounds for authentic speech and political action. This was a predicament unknown to the auteurs of the Cahiers canon (white men all), who could more easily adapt their political visions to the cinematic project of a “greater personalization”—before the personal became political in the name of feminism, postcolonialism, and civil rights. That is, before a new politics of identity would fail to recognize theirs as such. 

For an emerging would-be modernist like Carax, it might well have felt as if his artistic forebears, who promised him a revolutionary craft—the ability to change the world through sound and image—were responsible for leaving him a political vacuum. Or, rather, a world without a viable politics for him. It may come as no surprise, then, that Carax’s early films represent social injuries as Oedipal ones—as though artistic mastery and a true avant-garde were synonymous with a political authority of which his fathers had deprived him. 

Carax’s filmography boasts an impressively complete catalog of responses to this impasse. Having decided that his truth means nothing to power—indeed, that it can only be seen as power—the straight white man can opt to go mute, as Lavant’s character does in Bad Blood. Nicknamed “Chatterbox” and mocked for not speaking as a child, he holds himself hostage in a police standoff, dramatizing his own uncertain status as victim and perpetuator of violence. Or he can slum it like the characters in The Lovers on the Bridge, living on the streets, displaying a nostalgie de la boue (literally “a yearning for mud”), as if proximity to the dirt is their only chance at living an authentically political life. 

Or he can turn himself into a violent spectacle, enlisting his identity and image in the service of white supremacy. This is Merde’s approach in Tokyo!, the only film in which he gets to speak, his gibberish translated by a lawyer who shares his curious language. Having terrorized the city, hurling grenades into crowds of pedestrians, Merde is captured and interrogated, confessing, almost modestly, “I don’t like people…and among all people, the Japanese are really the most disgusting.” The Japanese public is split: some storm the streets chanting “Hang Merde!”; others carry signs that read “Merde is Great, Let Us Hate One Another!” All wield Merde’s image, some even sporting ginger beards, turning the xenophobic terrorist into a vehicle for political energy that, apparently, has no other meaningful outlet. 

*

Carax’s own quasipolitical strategy is, by now, a classic. If he struggles to arrive at authentic artistic and political speech, he can choose to disavow authenticity altogether. In It’s Not Me, Carax addresses the question of his own identity—and its shaky foundation for artistic practice—obliquely, through the spectral appearance of yet another auteur and another bad forefather: Roman Polanski.

Polanski’s holographic portrait hovers over footage from Holy Motors, a stretch limousine coasting along the Seine. “I don’t know this guy, but like me, he’s short and makes films,” Carax says in voiceover. Polanski’s image fades, and Carax keeps speaking: “Also like me, some would add: Jewish, white, male, heterosexual.” The sound of Carax’s voice on the word Jewish distorts into a low-frequency growl, as if the historical passage of Jewishness into whiteness were a gnarly process of erasure. (Carax explicitly invokes Polanski’s personal story—his transformation from victim of Nazi violence to perpetrator of sexual assault—but leaves its relevance unnervingly unaddressed.) The words white, male, and heterosexual, meanwhile, bear no trace of Carax’s voice at all. They sound like the staccato chirps of a digital voice assistant: “Alexa, what are Roman Polanski and Leos Carax’s identities?” 

Janus Films

Leos Carax as LC and Denis Lavant as Monsieur Merde in Carax’s It’s Not Me, 2024

This sort of techno-artificial play offers a path forward for artists who have decided that their earnestness has no political purchase. It’s a relatively benign counterstrategy to an ugly alternative: voicing authentically embittered speech, the route of the reactionary. In a hair-raising portion of It’s Not Me, on-screen texts reads, “They dream of the day when HATE will shout: HOURRA!” A laugh track plays over a spate of images made more menacing in their rapid succession and against the canned sound: Bashar al-Assad, Kim Jong Un, Benjamin Netanyahu, Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, Marine Le Pen, and Vladmir Putin. Each bears their own special version of a shit-eating grin. 

“And they all claim to be humiliated & insulted AND THE BAD DREAM/JOKE SPREADS,” the text continues. The image layered beneath the words “humiliated & insulted” is the same portrait of Dostoevsky from the film’s earlier paternity gimmick, now a reference to the author’s 1861 novel of the same name. What to make of Dostoevsky’s inclusion in this parade of bastards? What connects his depictions of psychological anguish to Trump, Le Pen, and Putin except that the latter now marshals them in the name of Russian nationalism? Is this the trajectory of modernist mastery: a direct line from auteurism to authoritarianism? Is this the fate of the straight, white male author who allows himself to speak his own torment, who is allowed to say, unapologetically, It’s Me

It’s a scandalous (not to mention remarkably undialectical) hypothesis, but late in the film, Carax makes a confession that seems to support it: “I don’t think I’ve ever done a POV shot…a shot filmed from the point of view of one of the characters,” he says via a seres of title cards. Such a shot would require laying claim to another person’s perspective—perhaps too much to ask from a director unwilling to claim his own. “I’ve tried to make déjà vu shots,” he continues. “The illusion of déjà vu, like a memory from the present.” 

Here, again, is the postmodernist playbook: recycle, remix, repurpose history as style. But the line is also the only acknowledgement that Carax gives us, humble but straight-up, of his own talent. A staggering number of images from his films, whether created on 35mm with the cinematographer Jean-Yves Escoffier or digitally with Caroline Champetier, generate this kind of imprecise recognition—as if they were both spontaneous and preordained—and not only because they have now been quoted by other filmmakers and by Carax himself, turned into self-generating memes. See, for example, when the camera tracks Lavant’s feet, as they shuffle into the cartoonish blur of a futurist painting, while he sprints along the Seine (Boy Meets Girl); or when it tracks him again as he convulses and kicks, just slightly downbeat, to the buoyant sound of Bowie’s “Modern Love” (Bad Blood); or when it remains steady on a now middle-aged Lavant as he sprints on a treadmill, faux machine gun in hand, donning a motion capture suit, that same futurism made farce (Holy Motors).

The genres, tenors, and material qualities of these shots change—they’re on set or on location; they’re in black-and-white or in crisp, vibrant color—but none can be said to capture Carax’s personal worldview. Instead, they project the reality of a world viewed, as the circumstances of viewing transform with new technologies and new conditions for beauty, comedy, and terror. They don’t reflect reality; they are the reality of reflection. This is Carax’s mastery: to become a modernist in spite of himself. His images speak the history of cinema even as they insist that he, at least from his point of view, can’t possibly say anything at all…merde.

New York Review in various formats

Subscribe and save 50%!

Get immediate access to the current issue and over 25,000 articles from the archives, plus the NYR App.

Already a subscriber? Sign in