Nocturnal perambulation at a Parisian nighttime, lamplights probing the streets for a French cinema's reigning mad romantic, Leos Carax’s debut film, Boy Meets Girl has claimed to mix punk sensibility and nouvelle vague aesthetics into a droll tale of doomed love story.

 

The film follows a down-at-heels young self-proclaimed cineaste (though he does not actually make one), tellingly named Alex (Denis Lavant) as he skulks around Paris during a heat wave. With the threat of a mandatory stint in military looming over him, Alex grieves over a breakup, attempts a murder without success, shoplifts records, crashes a swanky party and encounters a suicidal failed model, Mireille (Mireille Perrier), who is reeling from a busted-up romance. The two finally confront each other in a drawn-out and wayward dialogue at a kitchen table during an insufferable social party.

 

In lieu of seeming retrospective, Carax, known for his flamboyant cinephilia, has ineptly imbued silent-film convention of its evocative black and white effort with romanticism to show a level of alienation that gives the characters an almost limitless bottom line of emotional depth when boy meets girl. Equally worth mentioning is Jean-Yves Escoffier, whose glorious camera work alternates between a silent-era approach to lighting, depth, and background that showcases an inky and alienating take on Paris’ night and the separation from society, echoing with cinéma du look’s philosophy. The mystery is in the soundness of the directing when it gives a feeling of precariousness, where we are offered to see a renewal of youth’s internal struggle and the barriers life has put in their destined path.