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A street con boy nicknamed “Tongue-tied” (he’s not only quick with the hands, but a ventriloquist as well) is recruited by two elder thieves — both of whom were friends of the boy’s estranged, now dead father — hoping that the theft of a vaccination culture for a fictitious disease called STBO will score them enough cash to pay off a mysterious American women they owe money, and believe killed Tongue-tied’s father. Script-writer/director Leos Carax toys around with hoity-toity suppositions of love versed in namby-pamby poetry (his love is like “a wave crashing mid-sea, never making it to shore”) that tries and fails to equate some sense of mad love, unrequited. The movie is unbound with metaphors for the destitution of love, no more blatant than the viruliferous anagram that affects a couple’s lovemaking if one or both engage in the act without love and passion, and as far out in space with a coterminous plotline that boarders on sci-fi with Halley’s Comet approaching Earth. Of course, the biggest irony is that Carax attends to his film with the same passionlessness and disdain that the disease hits its victims. When Mauvais Sang isn’t weighted down by such pretensions, the caper itself hardly contains any tension or build-up, offering instead a couple of weirdly edited fight sequences. With Michel Piccoli, Denis Lavant, Juliette Binoche, Hans Meyer, and Julie Delpy.

[Not to be bothered with.]

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originally posted: 12/24/03 11:43:02
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