Leo Carax’s new short film “It’s Not Me”, which happens to be released in South Korean theaters along with Alice Rohrwacher’s new short film “An Urban Allegory” (2024), is elusive but undeniably intriguing in many aspects. Clearly influenced by those baffling later works of Jean-Luc Godard, the film often made scratch my head more than once, but it also engaged me with a real sense of wit and creativity beneath its seemingly random stream of images, and the overall result is actually a lot more enjoyable than whatever Godard’s later films attempted to do.

At first, Carax seems willing to show more of himself to us, but then his mind cannot help but follow his irrepressible creative spirit, and that is the beginning of his little visual joyride. He is really prepared to baffle or fascinate us in his own way here in this film, and I assure you that you will gladly go along with that especially if you have admired his idiosyncratic directing career like I have.

Like Godard’s later films such as “Goodbye to Language” (2014), the film frequently utilizes title cards for accentuating its ideas and themes. To be frank with you, I was rather annoyed by this at first, but then I was gradually amused by how Carax humorously handles this, and that certainly distinguishes his film a lot from Godard’s later works, which are nothing but hollow and ponderous cinematic doodles to me (Call me a philistine if you want, folks).

What is presented between these title cards are a deliberately jumbled mix of various video clips ranging from some rough home movie to a certain famous short film by the Lumière brothers. While this surely is another thing Godard tried again and again in his later movies, Carax easily surpasses Godard as actually generating a sort of narrative flow among these seemingly random video clips. You can clearly sense him trying one thing after another with no apparent direction, but you can also feel his wit, confidence, and energy nonetheless, and you may actually find yourselves often intrigued by whatever he is going to try next.

This free-wheeling attitude of the film will surely take you back to “Holy Motors” (2012), which is incidentally one of Carax’s better works. In that boundlessly fascinating film, Denis Lavant, who has been one of Carax’s main collaborators since Carax’s first feature film “Boys Meets Girls” (1984), plays many different roles as moving here and there by a big white limousine, and he even plays again that weird character he previously played in Carax’s segment in “Tokyo!” (2008). As a matter of fact, that weird character briefly appears in the middle of “It’s Not Me”, and Lavant has a little juicy fun as going all the way with his character’s amusingly unpleasant aspects.

Another interesting moment in the film is when Carax shows a bit of his sincere concern about how our world has been threatened more and more by the ongoing rise of fascism during last several years. At one point, we see a mother reading a rather twisted tale to her children, and we later see an archival footage clip showing a big American Nazi rally held in the middle of New York City. Yes, as shown in Marshall Curry’s Oscar-nominated short documentary film “A Night at the Garen” (2017), such a deplorable thing really occurred there in 1939, and the chilling images from that archival footage clip are strikingly juxtaposed with the current political status of our world.

Nonetheless, the mood remains casual and lightweight while Carax continues to explore the range of his artistic creativity as much as possible within the 41-minute running time of his short film, and that is why you should not leave the screening room before it is completely over. Right after its end credits, Carax presents a little surprise for you, and that reminded me again that I must re-evaluate his previous film “Annette” (2021) as soon as possible. I wrote a 3-star review after watching it for the first time in 2021, but its memorable moments have stayed in my mind since that, and I must admit that this unconventional musical film is much more interesting and creative than many other recent musical flicks such as, yes, “Wicked” (2024).

On the whole, “It’s Not Me” is a small but undeniably intriguing piece of work, and Carax demonstrates here again that he is still a talented director willing to take a chance at any time. After “Boys Meets Girl”, he became a rising new director to watch, but then his filmmaking career took a big downturn after the problematic (and very expensive) production of “The Lovers on the Bridge” (1991), and he seemed to crash down toward the bottom when his next film “Pola X” (1999) came out. Nevertheless, he eventually made a triumphant comeback with “Holy Motors”, and “Annette”, which garnered him the Best Director Award when it was premiered at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, solidified the second prime of his compelling filmmaking career.

Probably because I was charmed a lot by Rohrwacher’s “An Urban Allegory” right before watching it, I put “It’s Not Me” one or two steps below “An Urban Allegory” at present. but I am willing to revisit both of them sooner or later. Despite being quite different from each other in terms of style and theme, they somehow make a superlative double feature show, and it is really lucky for me and other South Korean audiences to have such a nice little cinematic gift around the end of this year.