Since its debut at Cannes last year, Leos Carax’s Holy Motors has been dazzling audiences lucky enough to experience it. An immersive and surrealistic journey, Holy Motors marked Carax’s triumphant return to the big screen after a 13 year feature-film hiatus.
From August 9 to 13, TIFF Cinematheque presents a retrospective of Carax’s limited but powerful film portfolio, showing all five of his features, and Carax himself will be in attendance at several screenings.
Boy Meets Girl
This black-and-white 1984 drama — Carax’s first film — is intimate and atmospheric. It’s also the first time Carax collaborated with one of his favourite actors, Denis Lavant. He plays Alex, a forlorn soldier who wanders into a party and meets a similarly depressed Mireille. So forms a liaison that revels in the mystery of the night, a dreamy and melancholic journey of young love.
Aug. 9, 6:30 p.m.
Bad Blood
Lavant returns as a thief in this thriller that plays off a very common Carax theme: tragic love. This beloved cult film is magical and surreal, and features one of the most memorable scenes in French film history as Carax’s careful camera follows Lavant as he dances wildly down a Paris street to David Bowie’s “Modern Love.”
Aug. 10, 6 p.m. Carax in attendance.
Holy Motors
A unique movie to be sure, Holy Motors is imaginative, thought-provoking and downright bizarre as we follow the mysterious Monsieur Oscar in his limo through one lonely night as he goes from job to job. Lavant once again stars, crossing paths with Kylie Minogue and Eva Mendes, among others.
Aug. 10, 9:15 p.m. Carax in attendance.
The Lovers on the Bridge
Perhaps Carax’s most ambitious work, a troubled production led to an imaginative, far-reaching romantic fantasy that boasts spectacle after spectacle. It follows two drifters who meet serendipitously, fall in love and take to crazed celebrations and adventures of excess and magic. The exuberance of the film parallels the passionate, crazed love, a path filled with fireworks, dancing and fire-breathing.
Aug. 11, 4:30 p.m. Carax in attendance.
Pola X
Prior to Holy Motors, Carax had not made a feature since 1999’s controversial and graphic Pola X, a romantic thriller inspired by Herman Melville’s Pierre: or, The Ambiguities. Sexual tension abounds in the life of Pierre as he resides in Normandy with his watchful mother and adoring fiancée. His attention is divided once more, however, when he meets a wandering woman who turns out to be his half sister — the daughter of one of his father’s mistresses. The two begin an illicit romance, shown in a graphic and unsimulated sex scene, but like many of Carax’s other characters, these lovers are star-crossed.
Aug. 13, 9:00 p.m.
