Boy Meets Girl (Leos Carax, 1984)

Yesterday I watched and wrote about Diva, which I found almost wholly underwhelming; this, on the other hand, is absolutely magnificent. It does share with Beineix's film a scene of cunning LP theft, which in this case is not entirely successful; it is characteristic of the delicate paradoxes of Carax's film that Alex fails because he gets greedy and tries to stuff too many records into his jacket, but that his greediness is an act of selflessness, because the records are intended for his unfaithful girlfriend. This was my second viewing and, while certain perplexities remain, it now seems, a little surprisingly, almost entirely pellucid. Yes, it's unashamedly "arty", and even rather arch in places, but it wears its influences (particularly Godard) so much on its sleeve that it seems unfair to accuse of it being derivative; this, combined with the fact that it has digested its influences into something wholly consistent and distinctive, which is all the more remarkable given the youth of its director. The black and white cinematography is astonishingly beautiful, somewhat putting me in mind of Pedro Costa's debut, Blood, from just a few years later; a comparison of these two might be interesting as it feels to me as if they have more in common than visual style – a combination of urgency and apparent stasis, for example. The images, just like the rest of the film, balance cool abstraction and perfectly comprehensible emotion, making much of the film totally understandable to anyone who has ever been young and in love. But it does not merely handle a perennial subject in an abstract fashion; rather, the abstraction is essential to one of its central themes, which seems to me to be precision. It constantly explores binary notions (visible/invisible; audible/inaudible; purposeful/contingent) and finds distinctive points between things we might have taken to be mutually exclusive. Thus, a couple's private embrace becomes public when Alex throws them some coins as if they were busking. When milk is poured into an opaque white cup, something that surely ought to be invisible, we can nonetheless just make out the level of the liquid rising through the cup. The sentences practiced by the woman at the beginning and written down by Alex at the end represent the nervousness of one partner who is leaving another and that of a young lover, respectively; but they also represent the indiscernibilty of the distinction between the spontaneous and the rehearsed. This also makes sense of the confusing narrative at the beginning, when the woman we assume must be Florence (because Alex finds what he takes to be her scarf) turns out to be a complete stranger, unconnected to the rest of the story. Yes, this underlines how the same stories of boy meeting girl, or girl leaving boy, are taking place everywhere, but it also breaks down the boundary between explicable and random events. Everything that happens, happens with equal precision; misunderstanding is still a definite occurence. Alex really does find this scarf, in this place, at this time, an event that could be mapped on his wall, along with the date, just like any other. Whether looking forward to what they will do or regretting what they haven't done, every character in Boy Meets Girl is living a life of equal richness, if not equal satisfaction.