The Night is Young

23/10/2024

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     Introducing Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Diva for the BBC Moviedrome series on cult films, Alex Cox reckoned the movie had no direction, only art direction. He said it was the only film he had ever seen where the walls, the set decoration, thecostumes, had all been designed around a packet of Gitanes cigarettes. A fine filmmaker himself (Repo Man, Sid and Nancy), Cox was maybe too busy directing films in the eighties to see that Diva was far from the exception; it constituted part of a wave. Films by Beineix (Diva, Moon in the Gutter, Betty Blue), Luc Besson (The Last Battle, Subway, The Big Blue) and Leos Carax, (with Boy Meets Girl, The Night is Young and Lovers of the Pont Neuf) were all labelled Cinema du Look: a movement that could be described as style over substance. Yet this would be to simplify the filmmakers’ intentions and refuse to differentiate between their sensibilities. Besson was the most commercially oriented and Carax the one most indebted to cinema’s past, especially the presence of the New Wave, with Fergus Daly and Garin O'Dowd saying, “in terms of Carax's allegiance to the Nouvelle vague, there is little doubt that he drew great stylistic inspiration from Jean-Luc Godard.” (Leos Carax) Godard’s work gives to Carax’s oeuvre its interest in form, though Jonathan Rosenbaum was right to point out the poetic elements to the director’s films, which would indicate just as much the presence of French cinema before the New Wave in works by Cocteau and Vigo. 

    Of the three filmmakers associated with style over substance in French film of the eighties, it may have been Beineix with Betty Blue who corralled a romantic sensibility into an iconic success but it was Carax who was the most interested in seeing his work sitting on top of a history of the image, one that he was simultaneously drawing upon and trying to regenerate. If the Cinema du Look was seen as part of a general post-modern move towards the unreality of images, seeing film made up of cliches, generic tropes, commercial imperatives and iconic self-reflexivity, this supposed a sophistication Carax more than most wanted to counter, that maybe even Beineix was countering if that master chronicler of the post-modern, Fredric Jameson, has a point. Unlike Cox, Jameson sees Diva in a complicated relationship with the post-modern, noting that its “extraordinary luminosity emits, no doubt, a secondary message about the technological innovations in film stock and processing” (Signatures of the Visible). He saw that Diva has a specific relationship with film and not just with generating images that resemble advertising. When Cox invokes the packet of Gitanes, it is the idea that we expect from marketing: that the surrounding mise en scene is there to serve the promotion of a product. If this is partially true with Beineix, even if Jameson sees more than that in his work, with Carax the film seems very far away from the advert. What, after all, is Carax promoting? If he is undeniably interested in style, let us call it a substantial style, one that counters the cliche of seeing style and substance as contraries when the director wants to promote nothing more than the existence of cinema.

   We see this in the marvellous scene where his central character Alex (Denis Lavant) first witnesses Anna (Juliette Binoche) on the bus. The scene is implausibly in shadow as it holds on Alex’s face as he seems bewitched by someone entering. The music is orchestrally rich and loud, and incrementally we see the object of his gaze. We notice a silhouette and part of her back in the white dress that leaves her flesh partially exposed, then see her black hair as she sits. The music gives way to the sound of the bus and slowly we see more of Anna viewed through Alex’s partial and surreptitious gaze. There have been plenty of wonderful scenes introducing us to a film’s love interest and, while we may have a problem with such a notion since the lover is usually female, suggesting a subsidiary role, we know too that it has a long history and that Carax wants to acknowledge it and augment it. Carax doesn’t pretend that Vertigo, Breathless, Taxi Driver and many others haven’t found innovative or memorable ways to introduce their leading lady, but he doesn't want a reflexive acknowledgement but an innovative development. He knows there have been many films before him but that shouldn’t be cause for homage; more for inspiring new possibilities. 

     One notices it too in the film’s use of David Bowie. Before the late sixties, most films relied on orchestral scores butthe success of The Graduate and Easy Rider made songs acceptable, and by the mid-seventies, their use was very common: American Graffiti and Mean Streets; even westerns. McCabe and Mrs Miller and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kidused Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan respectively. Carax wants to register the intensity of Bowie on Alex while finding a correlative to an emotion Alex can’t quite express. He is there listening to the radio, which is playing Serge Reggiani’s J'ai Pas D’regret - a nod within the film since this chanteur also plays a small role involved in the heist, though the film makes no clear link between the character and the song. (We must make the link ourselves in recognising the echo.) Bowie in 1986 would have been known to many well beyond France but Carax's use of Modern Love is quite different from the sort of hits offered in Risky Business, The Breakfast Club, and Top Gun. Carax seeks to de-familiarise rather than over-familiarise with Bowie's song coming in as the Reggiani song finishes. Alex recognises the shift in mood and takes off out of the apartment, running along the street to the song. He is more acrobat than dancer, finding an internal need that the music complements rather than a rhythm he replicates, with Carax capturing Alex’s mad dash along the road. The director offers a lengthy tracking shot which becomes more frenetic as it moves ever closer to Alex before arriving at an abrupt stop as Alex skids to a halt and the music concludes. 

   Usually, a pop song captures the period or reflects a personal mood, even if the music is anachronistic (as in the brilliant McCabe and Mrs Miller), Carax, though, looks for the music to capture both a personal desire and its impossible manifestation. Alex loves Anna; Anna loves the older criminal Marc (Michel Piccoli) and a typical love triangle is given in this scene a desperate force: Alex is a man with far more energy than the old Marc but with unrequited feelings he expels in a crazy dash that allows athletics to meet aesthetics, with the music sandwiched in between.  

     In casting Lavant, the director isn’t paying his respects to stardom but trying almost to create a new type of star. There may be just a little of James Cagney or Edward G. Robinson to Lavant: the pugnacious small guy who won’t get the girl, but this is complicated by what the French call the actor fetiche: the director the person chooses as his main figure. Lavant isn't just a tough guy; he isn't even a tough guy. Carax wants him as his chosen actor all the better to bring out an odd tenderness, to reflect as with other fetish actors a directorial sensibility. Sometimes the fetish actor is an alter ego; sometimes deemed a love object: John Wayne/John Ford and Scorsese/De Niro; Godard/Anna Karina and Antonioni Monica Vitti. Carax does both: casting Lavant in his first three features and his lover Binoche in The Night is Young andLovers of the Point Neuf. But our point is that Lavant is rough-hewn while Carax’s style is smooth, as though he wanted from the actor a look that would turn the potential artificiality into a harsh but tender reality. Lavant is the feral child of the Cinema du Look. When we often see him observing the conventionally beautiful and flawless Binoche, this doesn’t become a situation of mutual narcissism as we find in Subway between Christophe Lambert and Isabelle Adjani. It becomes closer to beauty and the beast, with Lavant’s fascinating but unhandsome face looking like it must find in other things as a way to win Anna’s affection, whether it is happily showing her some magic tricks or in a frustrated state turning over a Volkswagon beetle. In the former scene, he throws an apple up in the air and it comes down into the frame as a lettuce. He then throws the apple again and hopes for a pineapple; throws it again and numerous fruit and vegetables cascade on his head and fall into the frame. He shows himself a hazardous magician; capable of magic tricks but not capable of controlling their outcome. With the car, he is trying to expel energy on a hot evening while in the company of Anna, and goes outside, punches the air and overturns the beetle. 

     All the film's events are contained by a mise en scene that is as artificial and colour-coordinated as the example Cox gives from Diva. The apartment and streets are red and grey, black and blue with dashes of yellow. If Cox can claim the entire scene in Beineix’s film was shaped around a pack of branded cigarettes, Carax’s seems to be designed around a couple of posters in the street where Anna and Alex are staying. They look more like cultivated artworks than advertising posters, frayed and worn by a careful hand rather than weather and time. The apartment is mainly grey, red and black, with a dash of bright blue when Anna puts on a dressing gown. In most films, colour is a secondary property, with shape the primary one. A dress, a car, a wall happens to have a certain colour but in Carax’s film the operative word is just as readily blue as dressing gown; a grey street rather than just a street that happens to be grey. When Alex follows Anna we might be reminded of Antonioni’s Red Desert, where the street is so grey that even the fruit happens to be so. When we see the royal blue gown and the black bob Binoche sports, we might think of Godard and Anna Karina's sky blue robe inPierrot le fou.  

    Yet Carax’s relationship with cinema is complex and while The Night is Young can seem like a product of its time (the 1980s) and its place (France), it wants to complicate these assumptions. Moving towards studio artificiality wasn’t only a French thing; Wim Wenders with Hammett, Coppola in One from the Heart and The Cotton Club, and Walter Hill with Streets of Fire, were all directors apparently renouncing realism for artifice, seeing the soundstage as a way of controlling the film after sometimes difficult late 70s shoots, none more so than Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. But for all the control Carax exerts over his mise en scene and that makes it as valid an example of style in cinema as any, what are we to make of the scene on the plane where the characters jump out? Carax shows the actors doing the jump; no CGI, no stunt doubles. 

     This is where the film’s artificiality segues into realism, as if Carax well -knows that the importance of cinema rests on the tension between the reality the director works from and the artifice that goes into shaping the material. When he says of recent developments in cinema, “the cameras are more like computers. What’s the point of DP’ing? From what you shoot you can do anything after that in post-production.” (Filmmaker Magazine) Carax wants to retain the relationship between film and the real, seeing it as a made object and a found reality. We can speak of Anna jumping from the plane but it isn’t just Anna the character but also Binoche the actress. Animation needn’t concern itself with this type of division, and the more digitised film becomes, the more this distinction between made objects and found reality disappears. 

     If Carax was finally the most challenging of the new filmmakers in France in the eighties it rested on the intricacies of the problems he found himself addressing. He wanted the reflexivity of numerous cinematic and cultural references within a mise en scene that showed complete mastery of the material. But he too wanted us to be aware of a stardom that is underpinned by the simple fact that actors are also people, who have a reality beyond the frame and where he can incorporate that aspect into it - as Lavant’s background in the circus and pantomime becomes part of his thespian repertoire here, or where Carax can expect people to jump out of a plane and insists that the camera shows us that this isn’t Anna and Alex, but also Juliet Binoche and Denis Lavant. When critics and theorists argue about realism versus style, we can do worse than use a film like The Night is Young, so apparently stylised, to see how the divisions are rarely so neat.  

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin Tony McKibbin

The Night is Young

Introducing Jean-Jacques Beineix's Diva for the BBC Moviedrome series on cult films, Alex Cox reckoned the movie had no direction, only art direction. He said it was the only film he had ever seen where the walls, the set decoration, thecostumes, had all been designed around a packet of Gitanes cigarettes. A fine filmmaker himself (Repo Man, Sid and Nancy), Cox was maybe too busy directing films in the eighties to see that Diva was far from the exception; it constituted part of a wave. Films by Beineix (Diva, Moon in the Gutter, Betty Blue), Luc Besson (The Last Battle, Subway, The Big Blue) and Leos Carax, (with Boy Meets Girl, The Night is Young and Lovers of the Pont Neuf) were all labelled Cinema du Look: a movement that could be described as style over substance. Yet this would be to simplify the filmmakers' intentions and refuse to differentiate between their sensibilities. Besson was the most commercially oriented and Carax the one most indebted to cinema's past, especially the presence of the New Wave, with Fergus Daly and Garin O'Dowd saying, "in terms of Carax's allegiance to the Nouvelle vague, there is little doubt that he drew great stylistic inspiration from Jean-Luc Godard." (Leos Carax) Godard's work gives to Carax's oeuvre its interest in form, though Jonathan Rosenbaum was right to point out the poetic elements to the director's films, which would indicate just as much the presence of French cinema before the New Wave in works by Cocteau and Vigo.

Of the three filmmakers associated with style over substance in French film of the eighties, it may have been Beineix with Betty Blue who corralled a romantic sensibility into an iconic success but it was Carax who was the most interested in seeing his work sitting on top of a history of the image, one that he was simultaneously drawing upon and trying to regenerate. If the Cinema du Look was seen as part of a general post-modern move towards the unreality of images, seeing film made up of cliches, generic tropes, commercial imperatives and iconic self-reflexivity, this supposed a sophistication Carax more than most wanted to counter, that maybe even Beineix was countering if that master chronicler of the post-modern, Fredric Jameson, has a point. Unlike Cox, Jameson sees Diva in a complicated relationship with the post-modern, noting that its "extraordinary luminosity emits, no doubt, a secondary message about the technological innovations in film stock and processing" (Signatures of the Visible). He saw that Diva has a specific relationship with film and not just with generating images that resemble advertising. When Cox invokes the packet of Gitanes, it is the idea that we expect from marketing: that the surrounding mise en scene is there to serve the promotion of a product. If this is partially true with Beineix, even if Jameson sees more than that in his work, with Carax the film seems very far away from the advert. What, after all, is Carax promoting? If he is undeniably interested in style, let us call it a substantial style, one that counters the cliche of seeing style and substance as contraries when the director wants to promote nothing more than the existence of cinema.

We see this in the marvellous scene where his central character Alex (Denis Lavant) first witnesses Anna (Juliette Binoche) on the bus. The scene is implausibly in shadow as it holds on Alex's face as he seems bewitched by someone entering. The music is orchestrally rich and loud, and incrementally we see the object of his gaze. We notice a silhouette and part of her back in the white dress that leaves her flesh partially exposed, then see her black hair as she sits. The music gives way to the sound of the bus and slowly we see more of Anna viewed through Alex's partial and surreptitious gaze. There have been plenty of wonderful scenes introducing us to a film's love interest and, while we may have a problem with such a notion since the lover is usually female, suggesting a subsidiary role, we know too that it has a long history and that Carax wants to acknowledge it and augment it. Carax doesn't pretend that Vertigo, Breathless, Taxi Driver and many others haven't found innovative or memorable ways to introduce their leading lady, but he doesn't want a reflexive acknowledgement but an innovative development. He knows there have been many films before him but that shouldn't be cause for homage; more for inspiring new possibilities.

One notices it too in the film's use of David Bowie. Before the late sixties, most films relied on orchestral scores butthe success of The Graduate and Easy Rider made songs acceptable, and by the mid-seventies, their use was very common: American Graffiti and Mean Streets; even westerns. McCabe and Mrs Miller and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kidused Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan respectively. Carax wants to register the intensity of Bowie on Alex while finding a correlative to an emotion Alex can't quite express. He is there listening to the radio, which is playing Serge Reggiani's J'ai Pas D'regret - a nod within the film since this chanteur also plays a small role involved in the heist, though the film makes no clear link between the character and the song. (We must make the link ourselves in recognising the echo.) Bowie in 1986 would have been known to many well beyond France but Carax's use of Modern Love is quite different from the sort of hits offered in Risky Business, The Breakfast Club, and Top Gun. Carax seeks to de-familiarise rather than over-familiarise with Bowie's song coming in as the Reggiani song finishes. Alex recognises the shift in mood and takes off out of the apartment, running along the street to the song. He is more acrobat than dancer, finding an internal need that the music complements rather than a rhythm he replicates, with Carax capturing Alex's mad dash along the road. The director offers a lengthy tracking shot which becomes more frenetic as it moves ever closer to Alex before arriving at an abrupt stop as Alex skids to a halt and the music concludes.

Usually, a pop song captures the period or reflects a personal mood, even if the music is anachronistic (as in the brilliant McCabe and Mrs Miller), Carax, though, looks for the music to capture both a personal desire and its impossible manifestation. Alex loves Anna; Anna loves the older criminal Marc (Michel Piccoli) and a typical love triangle is given in this scene a desperate force: Alex is a man with far more energy than the old Marc but with unrequited feelings he expels in a crazy dash that allows athletics to meet aesthetics, with the music sandwiched in between.

In casting Lavant, the director isn't paying his respects to stardom but trying almost to create a new type of star. There may be just a little of James Cagney or Edward G. Robinson to Lavant: the pugnacious small guy who won't get the girl, but this is complicated by what the French call the actor fetiche: the director the person chooses as his main figure. Lavant isn't just a tough guy; he isn't even a tough guy. Carax wants him as his chosen actor all the better to bring out an odd tenderness, to reflect as with other fetish actors a directorial sensibility. Sometimes the fetish actor is an alter ego; sometimes deemed a love object: John Wayne/John Ford and Scorsese/De Niro; Godard/Anna Karina and Antonioni Monica Vitti. Carax does both: casting Lavant in his first three features and his lover Binoche in The Night is Young andLovers of the Point Neuf. But our point is that Lavant is rough-hewn while Carax's style is smooth, as though he wanted from the actor a look that would turn the potential artificiality into a harsh but tender reality. Lavant is the feral child of the Cinema du Look. When we often see him observing the conventionally beautiful and flawless Binoche, this doesn't become a situation of mutual narcissism as we find in Subway between Christophe Lambert and Isabelle Adjani. It becomes closer to beauty and the beast, with Lavant's fascinating but unhandsome face looking like it must find in other things as a way to win Anna's affection, whether it is happily showing her some magic tricks or in a frustrated state turning over a Volkswagon beetle. In the former scene, he throws an apple up in the air and it comes down into the frame as a lettuce. He then throws the apple again and hopes for a pineapple; throws it again and numerous fruit and vegetables cascade on his head and fall into the frame. He shows himself a hazardous magician; capable of magic tricks but not capable of controlling their outcome. With the car, he is trying to expel energy on a hot evening while in the company of Anna, and goes outside, punches the air and overturns the beetle.

All the film's events are contained by a mise en scene that is as artificial and colour-coordinated as the example Cox gives from Diva. The apartment and streets are red and grey, black and blue with dashes of yellow. If Cox can claim the entire scene in Beineix's film was shaped around a pack of branded cigarettes, Carax's seems to be designed around a couple of posters in the street where Anna and Alex are staying. They look more like cultivated artworks than advertising posters, frayed and worn by a careful hand rather than weather and time. The apartment is mainly grey, red and black, with a dash of bright blue when Anna puts on a dressing gown. In most films, colour is a secondary property, with shape the primary one. A dress, a car, a wall happens to have a certain colour but in Carax's film the operative word is just as readily blue as dressing gown; a grey street rather than just a street that happens to be grey. When Alex follows Anna we might be reminded of Antonioni's Red Desert, where the street is so grey that even the fruit happens to be so. When we see the royal blue gown and the black bob Binoche sports, we might think of Godard and Anna Karina's sky blue robe inPierrot le fou.

Yet Carax's relationship with cinema is complex and while The Night is Young can seem like a product of its time (the 1980s) and its place (France), it wants to complicate these assumptions. Moving towards studio artificiality wasn't only a French thing; Wim Wenders with Hammett, Coppola in One from the Heart and The Cotton Club, and Walter Hill with Streets of Fire, were all directors apparently renouncing realism for artifice, seeing the soundstage as a way of controlling the film after sometimes difficult late 70s shoots, none more so than Coppola's Apocalypse Now. But for all the control Carax exerts over his mise en scene and that makes it as valid an example of style in cinema as any, what are we to make of the scene on the plane where the characters jump out? Carax shows the actors doing the jump; no CGI, no stunt doubles.

This is where the film's artificiality segues into realism, as if Carax well -knows that the importance of cinema rests on the tension between the reality the director works from and the artifice that goes into shaping the material. When he says of recent developments in cinema, "the cameras are more like computers. What's the point of DP'ing? From what you shoot you can do anything after that in post-production." (Filmmaker Magazine) Carax wants to retain the relationship between film and the real, seeing it as a made object and a found reality. We can speak of Anna jumping from the plane but it isn't just Anna the character but also Binoche the actress. Animation needn't concern itself with this type of division, and the more digitised film becomes, the more this distinction between made objects and found reality disappears.

If Carax was finally the most challenging of the new filmmakers in France in the eighties it rested on the intricacies of the problems he found himself addressing. He wanted the reflexivity of numerous cinematic and cultural references within a mise en scene that showed complete mastery of the material. But he too wanted us to be aware of a stardom that is underpinned by the simple fact that actors are also people, who have a reality beyond the frame and where he can incorporate that aspect into it - as Lavant's background in the circus and pantomime becomes part of his thespian repertoire here, or where Carax can expect people to jump out of a plane and insists that the camera shows us that this isn't Anna and Alex, but also Juliet Binoche and Denis Lavant. When critics and theorists argue about realism versus style, we can do worse than use a film like The Night is Young, so apparently stylised, to see how the divisions are rarely so neat.


© Tony McKibbin