It’s Not Me: Leos Carax’s playful self-portrait reflects on a life of adventurous filmmaking

The title of Leos Carax’s It’s Not Me is, of course, tongue-in-cheek. Carax has always had a fraught relationship with his own image: he goes by a nom de plume that is an anagram of ‘Alex’ and ‘Oscar’ (Alexandre is his birth name) and his films often star Denis Lavant, who resembles the director, as characters named Alex or Mr Oscar. It’s no surprise that his filmic self-portrait is at once indirect and intimate.

It’s Not Me covers a lot of ground in a mere 41 minutes. Carax’s voice, gravelly from his notorious cigarette habit, narrates an associative montage of pictures, title cards, clips from films by himself and others and newly shot material, accompanied by a soundtrack that ranges from Beethoven and Ravel to Miles Davis, David Bowie and Kylie Minogue. To illustrate the mix of erudition, humour, provocation and pathos at play throughout, here’s a snippet from the start: in rapid succession, a paraphrase of Proust’s opening to Swann’s Way (“For a long time I used to go to bed early”) is followed by a shot of Carax sprawled in bed with his dog and two cats, which gives way to an introduction to his father in the form of a series of photographs, including ones of Dostoevsky, Hitler and Godard. (The voiceover, intertitles and image distortions recall Godard’s essay films, and the film as a whole doubles as a tribute to Carax’s late mentor.)

Inevitably, a certain investment in Carax and his cinema is a precondition to fully appreciating It’s Not Me. Viewers who haven’t seen Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (1991), and therefore aren’t familiar with Juliette Binoche and Denis Lavant’s ecstatic dash across the Pont Neuf in the film’s indelible climax, won’t be moved when Carax runs after his daughter Nastya on the bank of the Seine, nor when he later pays homage to her mother, the actress Yekaterina Golubeva, who appeared in Carax’s Pola X (1999) and died when Nastya was six years old.

Not all of the material is so personal, however. Carax also questions himself about the moral role of art in depicting the world – its beauty as well as its horrors. In a powerful juxtaposition, he succinctly draws a history of racism from the early 20th century until today by coupling Chaplin’s The Immigrant (1917) and a Nina Simone performance with the famous, horrifying footage of Alan Kurdi, a two-year-old Syrian refugee whose drowned body washed up on a Turkish beach in 2015. The sequence encapsulates the political thrust of It’s Not Me: more than just a self-portrait, the film is a testament to the importance of crafting images that bear witness to reality.

► It’s Not Me is streaming on MUBI UK from May 9.