What if loveless sex made us sick? The very strange, very French world of Mauvais Sang

When we meet Alex (Denis Lavant), the bad boy protagonist of Leos Carax’s dystopian fable Mauvais Sang, he is leaning, naked, against a mossy tree with doe-eyed lover Lise (a 16-year-old Julie Delpy in one of her first film roles). “My allergies are flaring up, like in summer,” he says, eyes moist. As they escape the woods on Alex’s motorcycle, their hair and clothes flutter in the wind. Alive with a gentle, awkward fragility, it’s a strange introduction to the antihero of a grimy heist film – one so shadowed by death and doom that its frames often look like ink-specked gig posters.

Carax is better known for his later work: 2021’s Annette, starring Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard as a comedian and an opera singer who conceive a singing puppet daughter; and 2012’s Holy Motors, in which an enigmatic man (Lavant, again) is chauffeured between fantastical roles. But Mauvais Sang, the French director’s second feature from 1986, is equally bold in concept yet sparing in execution, driven by a crystal-clear sincerity. From his penchant for surrealism to his abiding affection for hopeless romantics, outsiders and charlatans, we can observe many of Carax’s later obsessions developing here.

Mauvais Sang – Bad Blood in English – orbits the outbreak of a disease, STBO, which is contracted during sex if at least one person does not love the other. When his father dies, Alex – a stoic ex-con and amateur ventriloquist teasingly nicknamed Chatterbox – inherits his destiny. Summoned by his dad’s crook friends, Marc (Michel Piccoli) and Hans (Hans Meyer), Alex is coaxed to steal the STBO antidote, to be trafficked by shady US forces. This task propels him towards Anna – mob boss Marc’s ingenue girlfriend, played by Juliette Binoche with a magnetic, moony intensity – while the devoted Lise, whom Alex has cast aside, hovers on the outskirts.

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Although there is no lack of thrilling action sequences (a car chase in a stammering convertible, and a botched skydive attempt which ends with Alex embracing an unconscious Anna in mid-air), Mauvais Sang is, at heart, a romance that spotlights the poetry of simple pangs and pleasures: passion, sex, connection – even as love becomes a matter of survival.

The film’s centrepiece is an aching night-time conversation between Alex and Anna, illuminated by Lavant and Binoche’s quietly ecstatic chemistry. (They would appear together, again, as ill-fated flames in 1991’s Les Amants du Pont-Neuf – The Lovers on the Bridge – also directed by Carax.) In the aftermath of this long stretch of intimacy, Alex turns on the radio and bursts on to the street to perform an acrobatic sprint to David Bowie’s Modern Love. This scene – the film’s most striking moment of action – reveals the captivating heights of Lavant as a performer: a solemn-faced clown whose body is capable of releasing emotions that his mind has not yet discovered.

Much of the allure of Mauvais Sang lies in its surreal, somnolent mystery. Characters speak in cryptic aphorisms and fragments of love notes. The fictional disease is loosely sketched, unfurling in ambient glimpses – whispers, dreams, young faces wearing eye patches. What, exactly, is STBO? Why is its serum locked up like a crown jewel, perched on a plinth in a skyscraper? This is a film made and released at the height of the HIV/Aids epidemic, and its thinly veiled references to this reality – radical at the time, though perhaps risking insensitivity, for some, in retrospect – may have contributed to it being widely under seen and often difficult to track down. Put in context, however, the absurd secrecy surrounding the knowledge and treatment of STBO feels painfully apt.

Overcast by a sense of dark magic, the Parisian underworld of Mauvais Sang is designed to make touch feel both dangerous and supernaturally vital; its odd logic pulls its characters both away from and towards each other. At one point a passing comet compels Alex to carry Anna across burning asphalt to a hotel bed. Meanwhile, the mechanics of the body become ultra-visible: Anna’s bright blue dressing gown cuts through black and beige scenery and, elsewhere, in a refreshingly erotic depiction of safe sex, Lise tenderly removes a condom from its casing. It’s a riveting celebration of desire’s dogged persistence.

• Mauvais Sang is streaming on SBS On Demand in Australia, Curzon Home Cinema in the UK (under the title The Night Is Young) and Prime Video in the US. For more recommendations of what to stream in Australia, click here