alr

Bad Blood
(Mauvais sang)

Director in Person
Screening on Film
$12 Special Event Tickets
Directed by Leos Carax.
With Michel Piccoli, Juliette Binoche, Denis Lavant.
France, 1986, 35mm, color, 116 min.
French with English subtitles.

00:00 / 00:00
      Bad Blood post-screening discussion with Haden Guest and Leos Carax.

      Carax miraculously and effortlessly blends several genres in this tale of impetuous youth and forbidden love: part love story, part film noir, part AIDS allegory. The plot, involving middle-aged gangsters, young lovers and a stolen virus, exists primarily to grant Carax the opportunity to create an unending string of arresting images. Not to be missed is the spectacular sequence in which Denis Lavant launches himself down a city street to the strains of David Bowie’s “Modern Love,” a feat matched by the spectacular fashion in which Carax’s camera keeps pace with the hurtling youth. As Carax himself has pointed out, Bad Blood reveals that the filmmaker’s approach to cinema is rooted not in the Nouvelle Vague but in the silent cinema (which was also an important source for so much New Wave filmmaking), specifically, as Jonathan Rosenbaum puts it, “its melancholy, its innocence, its poetics of close-up, gesture and the mysteries of personality.”

      Part of film series

      Read more

      Overdrive: The Films of Leos Carax

      Current and upcoming film series

      Read more

      The Reincarnations of Delphine Seyrig

      Read more

      Ben Rivers, Back to the Land

      Read more

      Harvard Undergraduate Cinematheque

      Read more

      Make Way for Tomorrow. Carson Lund’s Eephus

      Read more

      Jessica Sarah Rinland’s Collective Monologue

      Read more

      David Lynch, New Dimensions

      Read more

      Museum Hours: Mati Diop’s Dahomey

      Read more

      Albert Serra, or Cinematic Time Regained

      Read more

      Wang Bing’s Youth Trilogy