Film - Think

Boy Meets Girl is a remarkable film for a number of reasons. At first glimpse it seems to be a formal exercise that plays with the unique subset of 1960’s New Wave films centered in and around Paris. Like 400 Blows it hints at autobiography. Like Band of Outsiders its transitions and visual digressions all serve to create a sense of place. Perhaps we can even see here some of the ironic moralism of Rohmer, a personal sensitivity to age and context. And also like many of the early Cahiers du cinema auteurs, it is the first film by a young man already well practiced in film criticism. Carax was only 22 or so when Boy Meets Girl played to acclaim at the 1984 Cannes festival. Eerily resembling the young Truffaut with 400 Blows in the same festival in 1959, it became a career defining moment. Though his more acclaimed films Mauvais Sang and Les Amants du Pont Neuf explored the same territory, Boy Meets Girl is the one-off masterpiece that only directors without proper funding are able to make. In an emphatic black and white, the first few scenes of the film set us up for the relentlessly visual nature of Carax’s filmmaking. He immediately proves his control over the camera in such a way that we don’t mistake the many later visual flourishes as mistakes. Some of Godard’s early habits, for example, were admittedly by-products of his makeshift approach to tracking movement. And though Carax allows this same sort of immediacy to affect his work, his portrayal of Paris at night is both free and exacting. A story as simple as its title, Boy Meets Girl is about a young man spending his last night in Paris before conscription. After being left by his girlfriend, he wanders through the streets until he meets an older woman who has also left her lover. What ensues is as predictable as it is believable and appropriate. Carax does manage to distance himself from his more obvious comparisons, as Boy Meets Girl is utterly contemporary in style and significance. And though the New Wave reveled in a sense of the modern, riffing on love, loss, and the pervasiveness of the media, Carax taps into the sense of isolation and malaise that perhaps only a French 20 year old in the early 80’s could begin to identify. It is a far less poetic and anemic isolation than that of L’Etranger or Vivre sa vie.