Zach Vasquez
For Valentine’s Day, we’re once again looking at the wide variety of onscreen relationships: movies about ill-fated couplings, toxic partners, and unconventional romances, to help offset the sticky-sweetness of the season. Follow along here.
“Me, I’ve never been in love. Only sick.”
“What’s the difference?”
That bit of dialogue, which comes early in Andzrej Zulawski’s histrionic crime-thriller-cum-romance L’Amour Braque (released 40 years ago this month), sums up not only this film, but every film in the Polish director’s oeuvre. To be in love in a Zulawski movie is to take ill both physically and mentally. Characters flail about almost every dizzying frame (Zulawski’s loyal cinematographers and camera operators sure had their work cut out for them), dancing, screaming, shaking, convulsing, crashing, collapsing, writhing, and beating themselves bloody.
American cinephiles have only recently begun to rediscover Zulawski’s films, with most of the attention lavished on his 1981 domestic horror drama Possession. Unfortunately and infuriatingly, that has fallen victim to meme culture, thanks in no small part to the extremity of its performances. So it may come as a surprise to those who only know Possession that, compared to L’Amour Braque, that movie plays like a Tarkovsky drama. If the lead actors in Possession begin level 7 intensity and quickly work their way up to 10, every single member of L’Amour Braque’s cast is hitting 11 from the get-go.
This makes for exhausting viewing, and if you’re someone who can’t do loud and frantic, you probably won’t make it past the five-minute mark. But it’s an aesthetic choice that is entirely suited to the material. L’Amour Braque—which has been translated into English as Limpet Love, Mad Love, and, most appropo considering the main character brays and howls like a canine several times throughout, The Love of a Mad Dog—is a loose adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevski’s classic (yet flawed) novel The Idiot, as filtered through the eye-popping visual and pulpy drama of French comic books (aka, bande dessinées).
Following a daring and ridiculous bank robbery in which the heist crew sport knock-off Disney character masks and toss around brightly colored smoke bombs (no one has ever confirmed that this was an influence on Point Break or The Dark Knight, but it seems highly likely), young upstart hooligan Mickey (Tcheky Karyo) hops a train to Paris, where he meets and quickly befriends simple-minded Hungarian refugee Leon (Francis Huster). Their bond is based mostly on their sharing jailbird fathers; Mickey’s dad was once a major player in the Parisian underworld until he was betrayed by the current bosses (a sibling foursome known as the Venom Brothers, who dabble in everything from prostitution and drugs to international terrorism and corporate takeovers), while Leon’s father was a political prisoner.
Mickey seeks to dethrone the Venoms and become the new top dog in Paris. But even more than power or vengeance, he seeks the love of Marie (Sophie Marceau, the future Mrs. Zulawski in the first of their four feature collaborations), the current moll of one of the Venoms, who is on her own quest for revenge against them for the horrific murder of her mother years ago. When Marie meets Mickey and Leon, she falls for both of them simultaneously, and thus kicks off the threeway romance (one of many through Zulawski’s filmography) that will inevitably lead to their doom. An early mention of “a dagger wrapped in silk” plays not as foreshadowing, but promise.
From the premise alone, you might be expecting a balletic work of ‘heroic bloodshed’ akin to the works of John Woo. And while this film certainly shares a lot in common with those, it feels worlds apart from them. Any plot exposition is delivered alongside a barrage of heady, existentialist dialog (courtesy of co-screenwriter Etienne Roda-Gil, best known as a popular surrealist songwriter) that mixes literary, philosophical, and political dimensions with reckless abandon. The characters here are nightmare versions of Jean-Luc Godard’s “children of Marx and Coca-Cola.” As they are blowing each other away with machine guns, lighting everything around them on fire with flamethrowers, and tossing around grenades, they’ll rattle off lines from and about Che Guevara and Fred Astaire, Mikhail Bakunin and Mickey Mouse, Maurice Thorez and Woody Allen.
That combination of high and low culture, combined with its visual overload—bold splashes of pastels and neon, noirish cityscape backdrops, and flashy suits that look straight out of Miami Vice—situate the film within one of the major cinematic movements of its time and place: Cinema Du Look. This movement emphasized the kind of hyperreal style and spectacle you’d find in Marvel comic books and MtV music videos. The most famous examples are French: Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Diva (1981) and Betty Blue (1986), Leo Carax’s Mauvais Sang (1984), and Luc Besson’s Subway (1985), but the influence was seen in American productions from the time, including Francis Ford Coppola’s Rumble Fish (1983), Tim Burton’s Batman (1989), and Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracey (1990). L’Amour Braque’s fingerprints can be especially felt in the latter.
As with Dostoevsky’s novel, there is also Biblical allegory, with the innocent ‘Prince of Idiots’ Leon standing as a purely human version of Christ, while “lost girl” Marie is obviously modeled after Mary Magdalene (even as she is styled like silent movie star Louise Brooks). However, it is not God who holds sway here (“If God had made us, he’d have made us different,” says Leon), but love, in all of its awful, awesome, destructive force.
In the end, the true Holy Trinity is a love triangle.
“L’Amour Braque” is streaming on Kanopy.
