29 Dec 2016

Boy meets girl (France, 1984)

Boy meets girl (France, 1984). Director: Leos Carax,  Starring: Denis Lavant, Mireille Perrier, Carroll Brooks.
Carax’ wonderful debut film set in Paris features a couple of nice pinball scenes… the first being a group of identically-dressed Asians playing Rocky (Gottlieb, 1982) and Spectrum (Bally, 1982). Then along comes a repair guy who opens up the latter machine and the camera zooms in, leaving us to contemplate the blinking lights, which look great in black and white...

A second scene involves the main character sharing a game of a French-speaking Black Hole (Gottlieb, 1981) with a stranger. They do quite badly, and the stranger who’s surely lost many a coin in the machine is so frustrated, he lifts up the machine from the front. He remarks that he’s going home to bed, but the machine isn’t even tired. In the long shot, we can spot we can spot Xenon (Bally, 1980) behind the Black Hole...


Lastly, there is a quick montage of the main character riding a subway intercut with shots of the credit display going up with the classic replay knocking sound...
Game over.

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