Les amants du Pont-Neuf (Leos Carax, 1991) aka The Lovers on the Bridge
Alex, who's homeless and addicted to alcohol, and Michèle, who's losing her sight, form a relationship while sleeping rough on Paris's Pont-Neuf bridge.
Juliette Binoche, Denis Lavant
I haven't yet seen Carax's first two features, but by the time of this one he seems to me to have abandoned many of the things that one usually expects of a narrative film: realism, genre, continuity.
To accept that these three characters are living on the Pont-Neuf (not underneath it) and only those three, in the middle of Paris, in summer, and that they interact in the way they do, and therefore have such complicated back-stories - is a big ask. And then - to make a leap from the beginning to the ending of the film - to accept that the two main characters can come from such degredation to looking like DeCaprio and Winslet on the prow of the Titanic - is to throw any kind normal credulity out the window. Obviously, we are in CaraxWorld. Processes we usually bring to the viewing of a film, psychological ones like indentification, and intellectual ones like learning-something-about-the-world, do not apply here. The main aesthetic consideration is an assessment of the Imagination of Leos Carax. Like it or lump it.
[As an Australian, I want to have a bit of laugh at the expense of the people who packaged the film here, calling it The Lovers of Bridge Nine. lol]
Garry Gillard | reviews | New: 30 March, 2017 | Now: 30 March, 2017