The artist is(n't) present: "It's Not Me"

Technically, 2022's Annette was Leos Carax's lockdown project, or at least the project Leos Carax would have been working on as the world locked down. Yet Carax's latest artefact It's Not Me really does have that lockdown project feel. Here is a dense, 40-minute Godardian collage - originally conceived for an exhibition at the Centre Pompidou that never happened, subsequently premiered at last year's Cannes, and now available to be pored over on MUBI - in which this singular French imagemaker looks back over his own life and work, perhaps with the aim of reintroducing himself to a generation who only know him from the Sparks musical about the flying baby doll. As that title suggests, however, It's Not Me also takes the form of a game of authorial hide-and-seek, in which a filmmaker addresses the question of who he isn't, in part to get out of the bind of having to explain who he is. His tools, on this occasion, are his own images: childhood photos, footage from his own back catalogue (ready yourself for lots of Denis Lavant, Carax's acteur fétiche, in various guises), new material filmed for the occasion, home videos showing Carax's young daughter Nastya - who may or may not have been the inspiration for Baby Annette - skipping along the banks of the Seine. Occasionally, to bolster his points, Carax will reach for the images of others: in a segment headed Bad Fathers, a shot of Adam Driver in Annette is juxtaposed with a publicity still of Robert Mitchum in The Night of the Hunter. Is Carax admitting to having been a poor papa (as some part of Annette surely seemed to), or indicating he was the fruit of a feckless tree? You be the judge, although Carax rather puts a thumb on the scales by flashing up a caption insisting "Cinema Forgives You Everything".

What's clear here is that by talking about (and filming) others, Carax means to better understand and define himself: it's been his life's practice, after all. He was, visibly, born into that generation that understood the Holocaust as more than just the Internet meme it's become: here, he juxtaposes the image of Hitler with those of latter-day tyrants (a real rogues' gallery: Putin, Xi, Trump, Netanyahu). A return to those lamentable images of dead migrant children washed up on European shores indicates a functioning conscience; the prevailing facility with multilayered sound and vision tells us something of Carax's artistic sensibility (and virtuosity). He cops to a more troubled relationship with the opposite sex, even while a few choice clips of the young Binoche in 1986's Mauvais sang demonstrate that few have filmed them so adoringly. The loaded name of Roman Polanski comes up in passing, though Carax is keen to point out that while he too is a director, he is not a monster. He is, instead, a man stalked by death, just like everybody else: in a touching closing sequence, Carax channels the spirits of former collaborators David Bowie, Guillaume Depardieu (son of, well, you know) and the director's erstwhile partner Katia Golubeva, all of which have long since flown. And a man who, for better or worse, has spent his days looking for beauty, and looking to find ways to enshrine beauty. (Stay tuned through the closing credits - with their not inconsiderable, Carax-approved bibliography and watchlists - for one of the great movie comebacks of recent times, a very special sequence that elevates the whole within touching distance of the essential.) The caveat is that It's Not Me can only ever be a snapshot; whether a Leos Carax highlights reel or a selfie taken by a less than willing subject, the film is but a flicker, and it would take 24 of them - frames or features - to get a fuller picture. Yet there's a kind of truth mixed up in there, as ever. Like so many of his films, Carax remains indefinable, elusive, perhaps indescribable even by himself. And unlike Godard: he's still here.

It's Not Me is currently streaming via MUBI.