Blood red: on 14 September at Villa Medici the first cult film by Léos Carax restored and introduced by the director

For all cinephiles who live or are passing through Rome tonight September 14th there is an unmissable opportunity: watching on the big screen, in the setting of the splendor that is Villa Medici, home of the French Academy in Trinità dei Monti, on the open-air square, at the screening of the restored version of Léos Carax’s first film, Blood redfrom 1986. The director, author of other cult films such as Pola, Holy Motors, Lovers of the Pont-Neuf and the recent Annetteis a guest of Villa Medici Film Festivalarrived at third edition, inaugurated on September 13th and which until September 17th presents a competition with many previews and special events. A growing festival and within reach of all budgets, given that tickets, including the one for the screening at 9pm, still available, cost only 5 euros. You can find everything at this web address: https://www.villamedici.it/festival-film-villa-medici-editore-2023/

Red blood and Léos Carax at the Villa Medici Film Festival

For the many who were not yet born in 1986 or too young in 1986 to have seen it at the cinema Blood red (which is originally titled Bad bloodthat is to say Bad bloodfrom a famous poem by Arthur Rimbaud), some curiosities to underline the importance of this metropolitan noir, released when its author was only 26 years old, which revealed the talent of one of the most original directors of French cinema and his fetish interpreter, Denis Lavant. Leo Carax is the pseudonym of Alex Christophe Dupont, obtained by its author by anagramming his first name with the word Oscar, speaking of ambitions. The cinema of the Eighties was full of genres, authors and surprises and this dazzling debut made the French director one of the most loved by young audiences, whose language he knew how to speak with a poetic and very dynamic and modern style. Red blood is a splendid metropolitan noirwith science fiction tinges, which sees the charismatic Sales joined in the cast by Juliette Binoche, Julie Delpythe greats Michel Piccoli, Serge Reggiani and the author of Corto Maltese Hugo Pratt, much loved in France, in one of his very rare performances for the cinema. There plot revolves around the fight between two rival gangs in Paris, who both want to appropriate, to resell, the vaccine for STBO, a sexually transmitted disease that is contracted through loveless sex and whose victims are mainly young people. Alex (Denis Lavant), who belongs to the gang led by Marc (Piccoli), falls in love with his woman, Anna (Binoche) and is also contacted by the boss of the rival gang, an American (Carroll Brooks), which offers him a higher amount for the vaccine. Caught between two fires, Alex dreams of retiring and escaping to Switzerland with his girlfriend Lisa (Delpy) but… will he succeed? In the remarkable soundtrack by Rosso Sangue appear David Bowie (Modern Love), Serge Reggiani (I have no regrets), Charlie Chaplin (Lights of the scene), Sergei Prokofiev e Benjamin Britten.