Bad Blood

A masterpiece of ecstatic cinema from 1986, by the twenty-five-year-old Leos Carax. The neo-noir plot concerns Marc (Michel Piccoli), an older gangster who lures Alex (Denis Lavant), the son of his slain cohort, into a plot to break into a laboratory and steal an H.I.V.-like virus. Along the way, Marc’s mistress, Anna (Juliette Binoche), falls for Alex, whose tender romance with his blond teen-age girlfriend (Julie Delpy) is threatened by his rhapsodic obsession with the dark-haired gamine. Carax sends Alex and Anna airborne in a parachute-jump sequence that is one of the movie’s many great plein-air set pieces. (The feral Lavant’s self-punishing exultation to the strains of David Bowie’s “Modern Love” is another.) With an emotional world akin to that of the New Wave masters, a visual vocabulary that pays tribute to their later works, and a visionary sensibility that owes much to Jean Cocteau’s fantasies, Carax suggests the burden of young genius in a world of mighty patriarchs who aren’t budging. In French and English.(Film Forum; Aug. 20-21)