Cinéma du Look

In the 1980s a few young French directors decided the surface of a film was not the wrapping; it was the gift.

Critics named it the Cinéma du Look and mostly did not mean it kindly: Beineix, Besson, and Carax made pictures that moved like advertising and glowed like neon. Diva started it in 1981 with a bootlegged opera recording, a moped chase through the Métro, and colours nobody had seen on French film. Their heroes are young, alone, and underground, sometimes literally: Subway lives in the Métro, The Big Blue at the bottom of the sea. The cycle closed in 1991 with The Lovers on the Bridge, which rebuilt Paris’s oldest bridge full-size on a lake in the south of France because the city would not close the real one long enough.