It’s Not Me review – an inno­v­a­tive homage to Carax’s main muse

If you ever hap­pen to see the French film­mak­er Leos Carax live and in per­son, per­haps pre­sent­ing one of his films, or even deign­ing to be involved in a mas­ter­class, then you real­ly do get the sense that he’d rather not be there. Which is total­ly fine; pub­lic speak­ing is not for every­one, and Carax cer­tain­ly seems like a per­son who would pre­fer to ram skew­ers in his eyes rather than crum­ble that divid­ing bar­ri­er between the pub­lic and the private.

Which makes his new medi­um-length fea­ture, It’s Not Me, all the more sur­pris­ing and scin­til­lat­ing, as it feels like the first time he’s let his guard drop just a lit­tle to tell us a bit about what he’s think­ing right now. He in no way seems loqua­cious or in need to be part of a dia­logue. Instead, he wants to get some issues off his chest in a semi-rant, and this wit­ty and cre­ative mon­tage piece cer­tain­ly ful­fils that remit (and then some).

Since his ear­li­est films, it’s been clear that Carax has been in con­stant thrall to the late, great Jean-Luc Godard, and where films like Mau­vais Sang and Boy Meets Girl tipped a beret to the ear­ly, more nar­ra­tive­ly-inclined JLG, It’s Not Me tips his hat to the maestro’s lat­ter, cut-and-paste video work, in par­tic­u­lar his epic dis­qui­si­tion on cin­e­ma and pol­i­tics, Histoire(s) du Ciné­ma.

The film opens on an image of Carax flopped over on a bed in a room. He flips a switch and the screen trans­forms into a green, heat cen­sor-like image, with the film­mak­er uncon­scious­ly writ­ing notes in Sharpie on a sheet of paper on the floor. The sense is that this mate­r­i­al is spilling out of him, and he’s maybe not so inter­est­ed in cre­at­ing a cogent struc­ture, but he does want to allow thoughts, images and emo­tions to flow out onto the screen.

You could spend days attempt­ing to deter­mine why the film is called It’s Not Me, main­ly because its prime sub­ject mat­ter is the director’s own work, the director’s thoughts about oth­er films and film­mak­ers, and the director’s mus­ing on his own life as a father. He claims that this is some ruse, a play­ful smoke­screen of ran­dom thoughts and feel­ings, but beyond the arch­ness and cyn­i­cism, there are some pro­found, self-reflec­tive insights about what it means to make mov­ing images in the 21^st century.

And do stay right to the very end, as Carax gives the MCU a hard school­ing in how a post-cred­it sequence should real­ly rip.

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