It’s Not Me: An Autobiography for a Person Who is “Not Me”

It’s Not Me: An Autobiography for a Person Who is “Not Me”

“Where are you? Leos Ca......”

“Me? Thanks for the question. I don’t know, but if I know, I would answer.”

Despite the interruptions of synthetic human voice recitations, the question from the Pompidou curator was clearly answered in a much more distinctive manner ----- How else can we explain the subsequent forty-minute cinematic monologue? We observe a rapid succession of computer-generated text and graphics: exhalations into a microphone casting doubt on the "WORK IN PROGRESS" sign, a countdown gradually ticking to zero indicating the imminent start of the screening, and the bilingual phrase "C’EST PAS MOI / IT’S NOT ME" flipping from mirrored to straight. Following this are split-screen excerpts from "Tokyo!", where the incomprehensible ramblings of the madman Merde converge into a cacophony of sound waves.

Leos Carax's new film, It's Not Me, opens with this series of iconic digital era elements. This approach not only continues the playful and unserious style characteristic of his works but also ambitiously declares the film's roots in digital media and post-production techniques. In stark contrast to the current global wave of cinematic nostalgia, the 64-year-old Carax decisively moves from the silver screen to the digital screen. Furthermore, these elements, referring to the filmmaking process itself, form the initial components necessary to activate a meta-cinematic device. Thus, It's Not Me manifests as a filmmaker's revisit to his place in film history and a reflection on his creative career before becoming anything else. In this sense, the peculiar title is indeed ironic, a positive statement disguised as a negation.

An autobiography, but written for a person who is "not me"; is such a paradoxical structure surprising in Carax's films? Looking back at his relatively few works, each subtly repeats a similar pattern: projecting the self onto another, a non-self, embodying the autobiographical nature of his works through the otherness of actors. Denis Lavant is undoubtedly Carax's most iconic stand-in. When they first collaborated on Boy Meets Girl, they were of similar age and appearance. Lavant's character, an ambitious but directionless young film director, was almost a mirror image of Carax himself. As Carax matured, Lavant's roles increasingly diverged from the director’s real life, moving towards a more humanitarian portrayal of lower social strata. Literary references also evolved, from the dreamer in White Nights to the god loving a phantom in The Myth of Sisyphus, and then to the bell ringer in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Yet, one aspect remained consistently autobiographical: Lavant's characters always passionately declared love to actresses (Mireille Perrier, Juliette Binoche...). The films became love letters from the director to his muses. Though Carax used Lavant and his fictional characters to sign these letters with the fictitious "non-self", it is clear that the reticent shots are the director's true words of love.

From today's perspective, the emotions in these love letters, once stripped of their rhetorical veneer, do not seem particularly healthy. Whether rooted in the deeply ingrained muse tradition of art history or emulating the chic on-screen couples of the New Wave, Carax's tumultuous romantic history with actresses reveals the French art scene's indulgence in male love myths of that era. Nonetheless, we must acknowledge that his first three films, often unofficially referred to as the "L’Amour Fou Trilogy", exude a cruel romantic allure precisely because real emotional relationships created a potent structure of desire within the films. Only a genuinely passionate seeker would be so enamored with such costly and fleeting beauty. This aesthetic lies at the core of the trilogy's narrative and style (with key images being the starry sky, parachuting, and fireworks— all ephemeral). At times, it even coincidentally formed a metaphor for the filmmaking process itself (as seen in The Lovers on the Bridge, where the record-breaking production costs led to both professional and romantic ruin).

When It's Not Me looks back at this history, the film's candid self-reflection is striking. In a segment titled “THOSE OF THE 20TH CENTURY (CEUX DU XXème)”, Carax compares himself to the infamous Roman Polanski, who fled due to a rape conviction: "I don't know this person, but like me, he's not tall and make films. Others would add that, like me, he's a 'Jewish white male heterosexual'... All of these people were born in the last century, and so was I." In a subsequent analysis of film history and language, he recalls the "only POV shot" he ever filmed, which appears in Bad Blood. This shot slowly zooms in on Binoche's face, from a close-up to an extreme close-up, until the "FILMED WOMAN(LA FEMME FILMÉE)" fills the entire frame with her smiling gaze. However, it is evident that the dominating gaze comes from the opposite direction ----- the male gaze from Carax himself and from the projection of the audience. Although Carax's tone carries a sense of nostalgia when narrating this segment, it still takes courage to engage in such self-deconstruction in an autobiography.

Carax's autobiographical desire through Denis Lavant's fictional performance is so successful that we often mistake Lavant's on-screen persona for Lavant's self rather than Carax's autobiography. However, let's not forget Guillaume Depardieu and Adam Driver, who, while not as intimately connected with Carax, still represent significant dimensions of his self: the writer yearning for maturity and abruptly abandoning his past, or the father raising his daughter alone after losing his wife. Even the name "Leos Carax" is a "non-self" ----- a chosen and constructed authorial identity, formed by rearranging the letters of his real name, "Alex Oscar". This real name is also used as an autobiographical symbol within his works. The first half is given to the youthful Lavant running through the streets of Paris in the last century ----- the heartbroken Alex, the thief and ventriloquist Alex, the vagabond Alex on the Pont-Neuf; while the second half is reclaimed by the aging Lavant, transformed into Mr. Oscar, the lone actor traveling between different "sets" in a limousine.

As Carax's latest puzzle, It's Not Me captures, scrambles, and reassembles elements from all his previous works and significant films in cinema history—not just movies, but also old archival footage, fragments of contemporary news images, life moments shot on phones or DV cameras, and a few newly filmed scenes. The goal is to create a more profound and truthful autobiography than ever before. Beginning with the ironically affirmative self-declaration "It's Not Me", Carax, for the first time, turns the camera so explicitly on his own reality and history. But don't be mistaken: as consistent with his career, this autobiography is not a simple reflection of truth but a stage for the imagination to roam freely. Furthermore, by liberating his films from the more classical narrative fiction, Carax attains a simpler, freer, and more essential fictional power. This power no longer strives to create illusions of sensory and logical continuity but is based on actions of disassembling and recombining, breaking and connecting. This dialectic, which has always lurked beneath the surface of his previous narrative films, is now more purely realized in the montage flow of It's Not Me. This filmmaking approach reminds us of Carax's cinematic "father", Jean-Luc Godard. This approach not only solidifies Carax’s legacy as a filmmaker who daringly blurs the lines between life and art but also reaffirms his place in the lineage of revolutionary cinema.

write by ANNI