Here is a 40-minute autobiographical jeu d’esprit from Leos Carax, the renowned director of Les Amants du Pont-Neuf, Bad Blood, Holy Motors and Annette; a body of work featuring such stars as Juliette Binoche, Michel Piccoli, Kylie Minogue, Denis Lavant and Adam Driver. First unveiled at Cannes this year, the puckish elusiveness of the piece is announced in the title itself.
C’est Pas Moi, or It’s Not Me, is a cine-collage essay in the manner of Godard, although the audio soundtrack does not quite have that papier-mache roughness that Godard often created. Godard’s voice appears briefly in an answering-machine message to Carax, a fragment that Carax might not have dared include while the great man was still alive. It’s a mosaic of Carax’s movies, private videos, archival footage and classic clips, punctuated with big san-serif intertitles: gnomic maxims and prose-poem micro-fragments.
The film is another moment to consider the great difference between the French film industry and that of the UK, the US, or really anywhere. What other non-French director, however prestigious, would be granted this kind of indulgence? Or would have wanted it, however seasoned it would be with irony and self-questioning?
Perhaps you need to be a Carax fan to watch this, and for me – as precisely this kind of viewer – this short film has all of Carax’s wit and whimsy, his distinctive streak of the grand and even the grandiose, his glam-rock self-dramatisation (there’s a big role for the work of David Bowie), his gloomy despairing rage at the state of the world in the 20th and 21st centuries and his concurrent streak of personal melancholy. (The very existence of this short piece might announce Carax’s conviction that his career is nearing its end – I hope not.)
The clips themselves are entertaining, although there is something very surreal in seeing what looks like a French van in a black-and-white archive clip, broadcasting a tinny dubbed French voice, which on close inspection turns out to be from the Stockport Water Board. C’est Pas Moi amuses – and discomfits.
• C’est Pas Moi is at the ICA, London, from 22 November.
