In cinema, as in music, micro-trends come and go: Will anyone remember "mumblecore" a decade from now? Yet the '80s French movement known as le cinema du look, based on three brash young French directors, has aged remarkably well. Jean-Jacques Beineix ("Diva"), Luc Besson ("Subway"), and Leos Carax ("Mauvais Sang") were praised and crucified for exactly the same thing: their bold embrace of visual style.
They were cool, in fact they defined cool, and they were most definitely sensualists — a banner since adopted by Wong Kar-wai and a few others — crafting each shot as a thing of beauty in itself. Rejecting the ossified rules of "serious" French cinema, theirs was a freer, more playful form of expression ... although a bit too free for the mainstream.
The three directors' paths have since gone in very different directions: Carax, after the long and troubled shoot of "Les Amants du Pont Neuf" (1991), went into semi-retirement, breaking it with the execrable "Pola X" in 1999, and then nothing until he resurfaced at Cannes this spring with the insane and polarising "Holy Motors," which at least proves he's still a young punk at heart.