‘It’s Not Me’ Review: Leos Carax Dreams of Godard in an Imperfect Homage and Self-Reflection
19.05.2024 - 00:25
/ variety.com
Siddhant Adlakha A self-portrait and cinematic essay, Leos Carax‘s “It’s Not Me” is perhaps the most accurate impression of a late-era Jean-Luc Godard experiment anyone has ever attempted. From Carax’s raspy voiceover to his jaggedly assembled combination of archival footage and absurd original snippets, the 41-minute short probes a variety of personal and political subjects, but it never quite beats with the furious heart and provocative spirit of Godard’s twilight era.
The project was conceived as part of a museum exhibition on Carax for Paris’ Centre Pompidou, but the prompt posed to him in the form of a question — “Where are you at, Leos Carax?” — appears to have led the enigmatic filmmaker on a confounding quest of self-discovery. The exhibit would never come to fruition, but Carax’s inquiry into his work, his lifelong influences and cinema at-large has yielded an occasionally fascinating collage.
The film not only ponders Carax’s past, through family photos and home videos as well as childhood touchstones like Tintin and David Bowie, but it also laments the future of the moving image, which the director’s voiceover claims has lost its sense of vitality and divinity in the age of cellphone cameras and casual image-making. However, the problem with embarking on this essayistic journey in such distinctly Godard-ian fashion — from bold, overlapping on-screen lettering, to jarring cuts that yank sound and image in and out of view — is that Godard himself did it better on numerous occasions.
The closest cousin to “It’s Not Me” is Godard’s “The Image Book” from 2018, which similarly mourned cinema’s power to shock and unsettle in an era of media saturation. Godard’s solution was to revitalize the moving image by making
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