Broad Appeal

It’s 1986 and a sexually-transmitted retrovirus is killing off young people. A massive pharma company have a vaccine in development that they won’t release, until a band of misfits break in to liberate it… Sound familiar? It is and it isn’t. The sophomore feature from French enfant terrible Leos Carax is a heady, swoony, futuristic Nouvelle Nouvelle Vague oddity, for which (Carax’s then-girlfriend) Binoche garnered her first César nomination. The real star is the film’s ever-shifting aesthetic that encompasses cartoonish absurdism, music video, spectacle and lyricism in equal measure. Alex (Denis Lavant) is a juvenile delinquent caught up in the vaccine heist but whose “amour fou” for the unavailable Anna (Binoche) has him completely pent up. You see, in this alternative future, anytime you “make love without love,” you risk death. This is a caper that is full of ideas, emotions and set-piece scenes (like Juliette herself - not a stunt woman! - dangling from an airplane!!!). If it left us scratching our head