Following our Valentine’s screening of Boy Meets Girl, join us for this last‑minute addition as we continue celebrating the wild, youthful brilliance of Leos Carax.

Made in 1986, this electifying second feature announced Carax as one of cinema’s great modern romantics and cemented Denis Lavant as his mesmerising on‑screen double.

Set in a stylised near‑future Paris gripped by the sexually transmitted virus STBO, the film follows young thief Alex (Lavant), recruited by two ageing gangsters to steal a life‑saving serum from a high‑security lab. Torn between loyalty, longing and the shadow of his father’s criminal past, Alex’s world is upended when he encounters Anna (Juliette Binoche), the enigmatic lover of his new employer. Their connection sparks a chain of danger, desire and reckless possibility.

A delirious fusion of heist thriller, doomed romance and pop‑art poetry, Mauvais Sang showcases Carax’s unmistakable visual language: breathless camera movements, bold colour, and moments of raw, ecstatic emotion, none more iconic than Alex racing down a Paris street to David Bowie’s “Modern Love.”

“A masterpiece of ecstatic cinema … 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.”
Richard Brody, The New Yorker

“Finds [Carax] at the height of his lovesick powers … The film is almost single-mindedly focused on cinema’s capacity to render affect with an immediacy and sensuality possible only through montage … There would be several fascinating films maudits and comebacks in the years to come, but this one remains the most lovable.”
Dan Sullivan, Film Comment

“It’s an announcement: Carax and Lavant are here, a cinematic force to be reckoned with … As romantic as movies get.”
Jeff Reichert, Reverse Shot