Leos Carax’s Self-Portrait Film “It’s Not Me” Is So Him

Fully half of the best films ever—from Charlie Chaplin’s to Claude Lanzmann’s—are replete with cinematic selfies. Yet they are rare over all, perhaps because the camera is an unflinching diagnostician. The medium admits self-portraiture with obvious ease (just step in front of the camera), but few filmmakers can withstand its penetrating gaze, which is surely why the practice self-selects toward the masters of the art. In the newest release to take up the challenge, Leos Carax’s “It’s Not Me,” the French director approaches the genre as a mosaic. He presents an audiovisual collage in which he only occasionally appears, made up of archival film clips and still photos, music and voice-overs, title cards and effects, and some newly filmed footage. With these elements, he forms a thematic and emotional self-portrait, delving into his personal life, taking stock of his career, and reflecting on art, politics, family, and the cinema as a form of self-discovery.

Carax, who is sixty-four, has been making films since 1980 and made his first feature, “Boy Meets Girl,” in 1984. His early career was meteoric. By 1991, he had directed two movies (“Bad Blood” and “The Lovers on the Bridge”) of breathtakingly grand-scale inspiration, but he has made only three features since (most recently, “Annette,” from 2021). His ambitions, formed by spectacular golden-age classics and by the moderns’ uninhibited artistry, have run up against the realities of the economy and the psychology of contemporary cinema—its all-too-common division of industrial power and artistic intent. Yet his presence in the world of film—even when it takes the form of his absence—has, alongside his output, made him an exemplary outlier, a living myth, albeit a reticent one. He doesn’t so much cultivate a public image as he bears it, as something of an Icarus of romantically visionary designs. With “It’s Not Me,” Carax confronts the aberration of celebrity (even art-house celebrity) by means of a cinematic self-creation that’s both a matter of sincere reticence and an audaciously assertive work of art.

“It’s Not Me” (now playing in theatres and available for purchase on Amazon and other sites, and, as of January 1st, streaming on the Criterion Channel) is as elusive as the title suggests. It’s a barely feature-length film, which originated as a commission from the Pompidou Center. Though only forty-two minutes long, it’s crowded with images and ideas, like a collection of keepsakes overflowing the little chest of drawers in which they’re kept. It’s also mercurially allusive, with its teeming material jammed together associatively, in an impressionistic whirl of abrupt transitions and superimpositions. Yet, as digressive as its surface seems, an artist’s sense of creative organization is at work. Elements are gathered together thematically and, subtly but surely, a chronological arc emerges. The result is a classical autobiography built of fragments and gaps—less a collection than a personal constellation. The title “It’s Not Me” may seem like a puckishly implausible denial, yet it’s accurate. The film, a shy director’s self-portrait, is filled with things that aren’t Carax but that make him who he is, whether memories or ideas, phrases or images, worldly deeds and works of art—especially, of course, movies.

A crucial element of modernism is the endnote—as typified by T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”—as a vital aesthetic element, linking a sometimes cryptic art work to the cultural precedents on which it depends and to which it subtly refers. That’s the tacit premise on which “It’s Not Me” runs, and its equivalent of Eliot’s endnotes are the credits, which detail all the films and music on which Carax draws. There are clips from thirty-one movies, including Eadweard Muybridge’s primordial motion studies, F. W. Murnau’s “Sunrise,” Nicholas Ray’s “Bigger Than Life,” Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” and much of Carax’s own work. The soundtrack features Miles Davis, Prokofiev, Beethoven, and musicians who have figured in Carax’s films, such as Kylie Minogue, Sparks, and, of course, David Bowie, whose song “Modern Love” anchored an unforgettable set piece in “Bad Blood.”

Early on, Carax shows himself in bed, accompanied by an allusion to the opening of “Swann’s Way,” and his vision of himself reaches back before firsthand memory, to his conception (featuring egg-related clips from “Bad Blood” and Ernst Lubitsch’s “The Marriage Circle”) and his family origins. His story and his family’s reach into the crises of the twentieth century and into contemporary politics. There are images of Shostakovich, Hitler, and clips that include documentary footage of an infamous 1939 pro-Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden (and its interruption by a young man outraged by the antisemitism on display). There is a segment showing politicians whom Carax deems to be possessed of “hate,” such as Xi Jinping, Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, Bashar al-Assad, and Vladimir Putin. (“They all claim to be humiliated and offended,” he notes.) There’s an astoundingly appalling bedtime story about Hitler and death camps; an extended lament on widespread indifference to migrants whose corpses wash up on European beaches; and visions of resistance, including documentary footage of Pussy Riot, and the French Resistance as personified by one of its heroes, Jean Moulin.

Carax riffs on his father’s identity, and the sense of paternity on display extends to “bad” movie fathers like ones played by James Mason, Robert Mitchum, and Adam Driver (in Carax’s “Annette”). Another of Carax’s cited father figures is Jean-Luc Godard, whose presence is felt throughout: the soundtrack even features a phone message Godard left for Carax asking him to call back, and the very nature of the project is reminiscent of Godard’s self-portrait film “JLG/JLG.” There are differences, of course; unlike Carax, Godard was a character, acting often in his own films and those of others, and he cultivated his public image with an artistic aplomb. Still, the similarities are felt, stylistically and technically, in the collage-like form and the free manipulation of archival images—and, above all, in a shared sense of audacious yet exquisite aestheticism yoked to a strain of refined, resolute insolence.

Carax’s art is exemplified with clips of ecstatic and intimate performances that he has elicited from regular collaborators, such as Julie Delpy, Juliette Binoche, Michel Piccoli, Denis Lavant, and Carax’s late partner, Katerina Golubeva. Her death, in 2011, haunts the film and hovers over Carax’s depiction of their daughter, Nastya, seen in home movies as a small child and, as an adult, as an accomplished pianist. (Carax uses special effects to transform a performance of her into a gothic extravaganza.) He interrogates himself, in particular, as director of actresses, through the self-accusingly melancholy lens of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story “The Birth-Mark,” about a murderous quest for perfect beauty.

While following his own life cinematically, Carax includes reflections on the art itself—in particular, his view of the lost grandeur of its classics, which he has sought to recapture with modern means. He discusses “the gaze of the gods” offered by the heavy equipment of the silent-film era, comparing it ruefully with the meekness of lightweight modern technology. He draws a similarly self-deprecating contrast between the laborious wonder that film of motion represented for the nineteenth-century pioneer Muybridge and the ease of modern motion capture as depicted (and transfigured) in his own movie “Holy Motors.” In an extended sequence, launched by a poetic riff on blinking, he links today’s inexhaustible profusion of images with a metaphorical form of blindness.

The movie concludes with a sequence of astounding, giddy inspiration. After the endnote-like credits comes an ingenious mashup of Carax’s celebrated “Modern Love” sequence in “Bad Blood” with his most recent feature, “Annette.” It’s a fusion of the classic and the modern, the spectacular and the whimsical, the boldly fictional and the self-effacingly metafictional. It’s no mere happenstance that Carax places this set piece after his modernist endnotes—it’s a whiplash assertion that the naming of his self-defining obsessions is beside the point. The movie’s referential fragmentation is secondary to its unity as an experience. What’s most personal about “It’s Not Me” is what can’t be sourced in the credits: the art of the cinema itself. ♦