The past few days we’ve been at TIFF many times to see the full output of a largely unappreciated film master, Leos Carax (b. 1960). Here we shall only try to briefly get to the nub of this complex, incisive and thrilling art.Pictured first are the supernal Juliette Binoche and the astonishing Denis Lavant in that dazzling and demanding gift, The Lovers on the Pont Neuf (1991). Vagrants on Paris’ premier bridge, under renovation, these two breathtakingly pursue visions of dynamic cogency, and in so doing they suffuse us with the frisson and the elusiveness of innovation as mired in venerable grotesqueness. Those of us who know Robert Bresson’s Four Nights of a Dreamer have the opportunity to become enchanted by the more recent film’s brimming with eagerness to add fire to the great template’s melancholy recognition of the pervasive dullness of callow pretenders to launching a world of chivalry they imagine to pass for something new.   Continue reading →