The self-portrait of a contemporary cinema genius

“And you, Alex, what do you want to be when you grow up?”, his mother asked. “Me? Jean-Luc Godard, esclar!”, replied the boy who, not many years later, would rename himself Leos Carax. The anecdote is apocryphal, but it points to the intimate truth of an artist who, in his early days, channeled the fatal romanticism and formal daring of the early stage of the author of "Pierrot the madman, who recognized the affinity by inviting his disciple to participate as an actor in King Lear. Today the short film It's not me presents us with a Carax who, directly, makes it clear he is Godard, speaking to us with the trembling diction that identified the spectral soliloquies of the Franco-Swiss genius, and emulating the essayistic device that he perfected in the atlas that is the series History(ies) of Cinema. A cosplay gens banal, as it became increasingly evident as the project progressed that Godard's purpose was not to pay homage to the art to which he had dedicated his life, but to explain himself, as if his biography consisted of the images that had shaped him, and his natural destiny was to disappear within the audiovisual stream of consciousness that he manipulated at the editing table.

With It is not me, a lucid whim initially conceived for an exhibition at the Centre Pompidou that never materialized, Carax picks up the gesture and makes it more explicit, synthesizing some stories of his cinema which allows him to bring into dialogue the images coming from his mind with History in uppercase, to contemplate again the faces of the women he has loved –Juliette Binoche and Yekaterina Golubeva– and, even, remix her imaginary, making the doll that gives name to Annette to the rhythm of Modern love by David Bowie that, four decades ago, gave Denis Lavant a fever in the central sequence of Bad blood.