'It's our first meeting. Only first times matter to me.''Then you won't last long.'One might say that Leos Carax's films deal with the tragedy of star-crossed lovers. I'd argue they deal with its direct opposite. His movies are never about the relationship between two suffering souls, but about their individual desperate need to be loved. His characters are not star-crossed lovers thrown onto the roadside by life, but it is they themselves who sink into ennui's depthless mire and keep on dreaming their broken dreams, eternally lodged in their own idle passivity instead of attempting to take the first crucial step to climb out of it. They hang onto a delicate string of wishes and fantasies with clammy hands and lose their footing in the real world, letting the abyss stare them in the face.In Boy Meets Girl, Carax amplifies the gaping rift between motionless reality and idealized dreaming with drawn-out, static scenes that drown in the black-and-white trivialness of each frame. The events depicted are but trifles in a person's life, but their outstretched limbs keep their two individuals captive. What neither of them realizes is that in fact it's their hands crushing the air from their own throat.The 'party scene' is the definite standout. It is one long nightmarish rumination on loneliness in the crowd. Two tormented young people drinking tea from a broken cup in the empty kitchen; instigator and victim of their own ruined fate. They lull their unconscious into the realness of their interaction, and convince themselves that they're talking to each other instead of burning themselves with selfishly feverish monologues about their own misery.Carax mercilessly thrusts his characters into the faux hope of a chance for love for 1 h 40 minutes. He makes them believe that the bond that ties them together is the missing puzzle piece needed for their never-experienced happiness. Only when it is too late do they realize that the only piece that made up the puzzle was their own life, now irretrievably lost in the suicidal despair closing in from below.
