Leos Carax’s “It’s Not Me” is said to have been made for an exhibition in Paris that never took place, in response to the question, “Where are you at, Leos Carax?” His response is a daring 42-minute film that’s parts autobiography, collage, stunt, and state of the union address, particularly in terms of art. Don’t let the running time fool you: it is a major film in Carax’s body of work, and a startling return to form after his disastrous “Annette.”
It’s one of those rapid-fire, stream-of-consciousness works of audio-visual art that seem to be burning through ideas as fast as you can watch them. Carax blends footage of past films such as “Mauvais Song” and “Holy Motors” and “Annette” with home movies and stock footage and clips from legendary films to forge a slipstream of memory and regret.
We see footage of Carax’s daughter from a young age on a bike, casually expressing disappointment at the time he’s spent making movies. Cut to text saying that “Cinema Forgives.” Cut to a riff on bad fathers that includes images from Nicholas Ray’s “Bigger than Life.” I may be misremembering the order of some of these sequences, even though I’ve seen “It’s Not Me” three times, two of which in a single setting. Not to let myself off the hook, but misremembering hardly seems to matter, as the film seems designed to mutate in your mind even after the experience of watching it has ceased.
Guilt over favoring ambition over parenting animated “Annette,” in which an opera singer and a stand-up comic had a child that was played by a marionette. When Carax mentions bad fathers, footage of him shooting “Annette” almost subliminally surfaces, and this misbegotten film emerges again at the end of “It’s Not Me,” as a refrain, as we see puppeteers camouflaged in black garb guiding the puppet of Annette to dance to David Bowie’s “Modern Love.” Swimming around in “It’s Not Me” is a compressed remake of “Annette” that distills that project to its purity, a poem of guilt and love and yearning.
There’s an acknowledgment of the director Roman Polanski, which I’ve noticed that many critics have decided to pretend isn’t there. Understandably, because that’s easier than dealing with the material. Carax’s frequent collaborator Denis Levant glides through Paris in a limousine, in footage that is either remade or recycled from “Holy Motors,” while Carax speaks in voiceover about Polanski as a man, like him, who is short and makes movies. He reminds us that Polanski survived the concentration camp in Krakow and lost his wife to the butchery of the Manson Family. Carax also says straightforwardly that Polanski sodomized a young girl. Polanski has survived an amount of suffering that is beyond the imagination of most members of the middle class; he also committed heinous sex crimes, inflicting suffering of his own. These statements are all true, whether or not we find them convenient to however we wish to simplify a polarizing figure.
Remarkably, this riff doesn’t feel like trolling. Make no mistake, Carax wants you to find this sequence uncomfortable, but there’s earnestness in his free-association. I don’t wish to definitively assign “meaning” to a film this adventurous, but it seems that the Polanski sequence exists as a plea from a daring artist for us not to let media do our thinking for us, reducing life to pitiful binaries. Life is chaotic, awful, exhilarating, irresolvable, and so are its participants. Polanski’s fall complements the fallen men, or bad fathers, thread of “It’s Not Me,” while anticipating a thread that will suggest a master statement.
Carax shows footage of an old film that I couldn’t identify, in which a man walks through a foreboding countryside while the camera follows behind him in a tracking shot. In voiceover as the scene plays out, Carax says that in old movies you could feel the weight of these heavy cameras, which suggested the gaze of God. Carax says that a guy filming his girlfriend on his featherweight iPhone couldn’t begin to connote such weight.
That’s a profound statement, a cross-association that gets at the mad disposability of modern social media, which, coupled with the Polanski riff, suggests how such disposability leads to easy reductions and unthinking tribal unities. I’m not saying that we should glance over Polanski’s crimes because of his talent, and neither is Carax. The request is to see multitudes. I have a few friends who pretend any artist who gets into trouble isn’t talented. That’s easy, not to mention boring.
There are references here to Hitler, particularly a quotation of Fritz Lang’s thriller “Man Hunt,” and later to Putin, Trump, etc. But Carax doesn’t submit to the political hectoring that he decries elsewhere: the images of these strong men are frightening but, in this series of juxtapositions, clearly inevitable in an age with a populace that is perhaps more easily manipulated than ever before.
One poetic observation goes even further than the one about respective weights of cameras. Carax says that we blink to keep our eyes from drying out, though modern society produces images at a rate even faster than that of blinking. I am reminded of something I recently read about Netflix: that they advise screenwriters to have characters announce what they are doing so that people can watch their products while doing other activities. That’s art as content, as consumption, and it’s quite literally mind-numbing. Numbness leads to complacency, and later to alienation, and later still to strongmen. Does Carax wish for us to connect all of his fancies this neatly? Will you connect his fancies in a fashion totally different from my own? Yes, no, and maybe.
“It’s Not Me,” with its wild rhymes and ecstatic imagery, is concerned with making movies poetic again, not that Carax would ever say such a thing so bluntly. Every image that we see in this film, whether borrowed from someplace else or created by Carax himself, matters. These are wild, mysterious, beautiful images with emotional and material weight. A sequence in which a woman runs with a machine gun against a green screen parodies modern action fantasies while outdoing them in terms of style and emotional pull. By letting the green screen show, we are paradoxically drawn in to the illusion, made co-conspirators. The recent “Wicked,” with its yards of hideously listless effects drafted by committee, can’t begin to compete with Carax’s many wonders.
Obvious reference points for “It’s Not Me” are the cine-essays that Jean-Luc Godard produced in the last years of his life, especially the monumental “Goodbye to Language.” The best compliment that I can pay Carax is to say that he earns the Godard comparison in his ability to fashion miraculous images that expand the boundaries of cinema and awaken us from the slumber fostered by art-product. And I’ll do Carax one better: he blends the formal mastery of elder Godard with the exuberance of young Godard. “It’s Not Me” drops the gauntlet for another New Wave. Will anyone seize the challenge?
The notion of modern media as a relentless leviathan of stultifying stimulation leads me to think of Steven Spielberg’s “Minority Report,” which has been on various streamers for ages and which the Criterion Channel is spotlighting this month as part of a series of films concerned with modern surveillance. In the summer of 2002, “Minority Report” felt like a palette cleanser for Spielberg after the even darker “A.I. Artificial Intelligence.” For many years since then, however, the film has felt like the most prescient piece of American science fiction since … I’d have to look it up.
“Minority Report” is about a world in which people are punished for crimes they have yet to commit, but that a trio of imprisoned psychics insist that they will commit. Punishment for crimes not yet verified has modern resonances that I’m hoping that I don’t have to elucidate. Even scarier is the film’s understanding of our relationship to technology. Tom Cruise’s drug addicted detective loses himself in 3D home videos of the family he has lost, dodging reality via simulations. During the film’s brilliant chase sequences, advertisements follow people about, drawn in by a device that has been planted in our eyes. The government is everywhere, and is most interested in measures involving punitive actions and capitalism. The ads that stalk us can’t even count as metaphor anymore, as Spielberg fashions a future shock atmosphere that suggests social media writ totally physical. Spielberg’s film, taken from a Philip K. Dick story, also anticipates us not caring about the loss of our privacy, provided that we are compensated with convenience.
Spielberg’s muscular filmmaking keeps “Minority Report” from turning into a paranoid tirade—his reputation as one of the greatest of action directors is very much in evidence here. Spielberg fashions images that are gloriously alive. He can fit in dozens of set-ups in a single shot, fluidly blending multiple perspectives into sharp physical stanzas that show a world off its axis. Thematically, “Minority Report” is in sync with “It’s Not Me,” and formally it’s similarly electrifying.
This double bill would make for a great start to this new and very uncertain year, reminding us of what cinema can be: art.
“It’s Not Me” is now on the Criterion Channel. So is “Minority Report,” which is also streaming on Paramount +.
