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Boy Meets Girl @ Robert Classic French Film Festival

In this debut feature by Leos Carax ("Holy Motors," "Pola X"), Alex (Denis Lavant) has just been dumped by his girlfriend in favor of his best friend. Fascinated by first times -- first break-up, first attempted murder -- Alex decides to strangle his friend but gives up before finishing the deed. Wandering the evening streets, Alex overhears another romantic uncoupling when Mireille (Mireille Perrier), a girl from provincial France who has come up to Paris to make commercials, is left by her boyfriend. When these two tormented souls run into each other at a party, they're fated to begin a doomed relationship.

The Village Voice describes "Boy Meets Girl" as "a debut feature of extraordinary passion and vigor. It premiered at the International Critics' Week at the Cannes film festival, and it hit the French cinema like a lightning bolt -- sudden and electrifying." And the New Yorker's Richard Brody writes: "The meteoric first film by Leos Carax -- which he made at the age of twenty-three, in 1984 -- hurls Alex (Denis Lavant), an aspiring filmmaker, through a permanently nocturnal Parisian atmosphere of poetic coincidences and crazy risks, out of one desperately romantic relationship and into another.... Ecstatic cinema and ecstatic living are joined in a pressurized promise of glory and misery, a flameout waiting to happen -- and to be filmed."

With an introduction and post-film discussion by Lionel Cuillé, the Jane and Bruce Robert professor of French and Francophone studies at Webster University.