Mauvais Sang

Mauvais Sang (Bad Blood, 1986) is a French drama by Léos Carax you can watch online on iFILM. Made when Carax was 25, it announced him as one of the most distinctive voices in European cinema — romantic, furious, and completely its own thing.

A near-future Paris gripped by a virus called STBO, which kills those who have sex without love. Two aging criminals recruit the son of their dead partner — young Alex — to steal a vaccine from a guarded lab. Alex agrees. But at one associate's home there is a woman named Anna, and the job stops being just a job. Denis Lavant plays Alex with a coiled, restless physicality; Juliette Binoche is Anna, and together they carry something that feels genuinely dangerous.

Cinematographer Jean-Yves Escoffier shot the city at night so that Paris looks like something half-remembered. The sequence where Alex sprints down an empty street to Bowie's "Modern Love" became one of the defining images of 1980s art cinema. Michel Piccoli, Serge Reggiani and a very young Julie Delpy fill out the cast. Stream Mauvais Sang (1986) online on iFILM.