Boy Meets Girl

Leos Carax’s debut feature is a lush black-and-white fable of last-ditch romance and a prodigious act of youthful self-mythologizing, drawn from a cinephilic grab bag of influences and allusions. Denis Lavant, in his first of four collaborations with Carax to date, plays an emotionally shattered filmmaker who finds consolation after a bad break-up in the arms of an equally depressed young woman. Shot when the director was all of 24, the film instantly situated Carax as a modern-day heir to the great French Romantics. It prompted the critic Serge Daney to declare “that the cinema will go on, will produce a Rimbaud against all odds, that it will start again at zero, that it will not die.” A Carlotta US release.