449, May 1989,[1] in which he classified Luc Besson, Jean-Jacques Beineix and Leos Carax as directors of the "look".
[3] It referred to films that had a slick, gorgeous visual style[3] and a focus on young, alienated characters[4] who were said to represent the marginalized youth of François Mitterrand's France.
[5] Themes that run through many of their films include doomed love affairs, young people more affiliated to peer groups than families, a cynical view of the police, and the use of scenes in the Paris Métro to symbolise an alternative, underground society.
[3] A parallel can be drawn between these French filmmakers' productions and New Hollywood films including most notably Francis Ford Coppola's One from the Heart (1981) and Rumble Fish (1983), Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Lola (1981), as well as television commercials, music videos and the series Miami Vice.
[6] The term was first defined by Raphael Bassan in La Revue De Cinema as an insult.