"The loneliness which wraps the work of art is infinite, and it is nothing which makes it possible less to reach them than criticism. Only the love can apprehend them, to seize them and show accuracy at their place"
(Rilke - letter with a young poet)
"I don't really like writing scripts...For me, it's more like a musical score, with colours and emotions... (Leos Carax)
Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (1991) is one of the most visually exhilarating and intelligent films of recent years. A true "cinema of attractions", with music, colour, dazzling camera work, melodramatic coincidences and tour de force performances from Juliette Binoche and Denis Lavant.
Leos Carax has all the attributes of the perfect auteur: his work displays not only consistency of theme (amour fou) and cast, but is also cine-literate (Les Amants du Pont-Neuf has many references, from Chaplin's City Lights to Vigo's L'Atalante). His "slight" boy-meets-girl plots are secondary to a mise en scene which is both tightly controlled - particularly in its use of long takes - and deliriously abandoned. Carax's prolonged struggle to complete Les Amants du Pont-Neuf against all odds and resulting in one of the highest French film budgets ever fuels the romantic myth of the artiste maudit.
Paris, Summer 1989. A young vagrant Alex is hit by a car on the boulevard Sebastopol and taken to the Nanterre night refuge for the homeless where he is given a shower and bed among fellow streetlife. Back at the Pont-Neuf which is closed for repairs, he finds that the location he shares with the older Hans (the bridge's unofficial homeless landlord) is also occupied by Michele, a dishevelled young artist who previously drew portraits of Alex as he was lying unconscious on the road the night before.
Michele, who is suffering from a degenerative eye disease and wears an eye patch, has left her middle-class home to keep drawing before she goes blind. Against Hans' wishes, Alex insists she stays and falls completely in love with her. She too is drawn to Alex but in a more ambiguous way.
She stays on the bridge during the summer, with Alex and Hans, the increasingly paternalistic onlooker. There follows a number of separate sequences - Alex and Michele drinking cheap red wine, riding the Metro and stealing money from tourists and eventually "escaping" to the sea. Alex and Michele are the familiar French lovers-on-the-run, nurtured by the maternal city which locates, feeds and entertains them, most spectacularly during the Bastille night celebrations. This is the climax of the film in a cinematic as well as narrative sense, the erotically charged histrionics of the lovers matching the grandiose state display, a bravura parade of sounds and images - filmic fireworks of breathtaking virtuosity.
Despite Alex's efforts to hide the news from her, Michele finally learns that she can be cured and leaves the bridge; Hans slides into the Seine; Alex serves a jail sentence. Some years later they are reunited, but Michele cured by an eye-specialist who has become her lover, is unable to accept Alex. In frustration Alex attacks her and they plunge into the Seine, but they are rescued by a barge en route for La Havre, the same route once covered by Vigo's L'Atalante.
The story of how a film about three people on a bridge became one of the most expensive ever-made in France is extensively documented, and unsurprisingly when Les Amants du Pont-Neuf was finally released in Paris, it suffered greatly from the attendant press coverage (although Cahiers du cinema devoted an entire issue to the film). Perhaps now, the film can be appreciated less as a cause célèbre and more for what it is, a remarkable, if intemperate, hymn to the importance of love.
"For Les Amants my starting point was two strong feelings I have about life and love. One is the "irredeemable"; the other a difficult word to translate - "l'inespere", what you don't dare hope for, it's something you don't really dare dream about, but you do dream about it nonetheless"
(Leos Carax)
Les Amants du Pont-Neuf is a hybrid film containing moments of startling realism, especially the opening sequences among the homeless which was short on location "cine-verite" style. But essentially the film is about the romance of existential choice not socio-economic reality, hence the re-location from Nanterre to the staged beauty of the Pont-Neuf, which is spectacularly displayed as both a real location and a set, becoming a metonym for Paris. The vagrant/outsider theme is a metaphor for marginality in the same way that Michele's near-blindness is exploited for its melodramatic potential and is not a statement concerning disability. Michele's condition is only fairy-tale, a device which, when resolved at the end of the film serves only to reveal more forcibly a stunning conclusion.
If Carax's film trilogy - Boy meets Girl (1983), Mauvais Sang (1989), Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (1991) - can be categorized, the first is about loneliness and the second tenderness, Les Amants du Pont-Neuf represents ecstasy. Ultimately Carax has proved that film-making which reflects his own obsessive passions can result in magnificent cinema.
