In Les amants du Pont-Neuf, two rebellious outcasts – Alex (Denis Lavant), an addict dreaming of a circus career and Michèle (Juliette Binoche), an artist gradually losing her sight and on the run from her rich family – come together in challenging circumstances marked by physical dirt and spiritual purity. The oldest bridge in Paris, sitting under the open sky and above the flowing river, becomes the home of this gritty romance, and as a wordless political jab, the official fireworks of the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution light up the background of this intimate tale.
Carax presents the viewer with incredible hallucinatory epiphanies – one culminating in Binoche waterskiing on the Seine – creating with his restless camera a unique, brutal and hard-hitting Baudelairean-Apollinairean piece of poetry. Violence rears its head, both through Alex’s impulses and the wretched conditions, and the influence of Bresson (Pickpocket, 1959, Four Nights of a Dreamer, 1971, L’Argent, 1983) is clearly felt. The theme of blindness, later pretty much ripped off by Lars von Trier for Dancer in the Dark (2000), is an homage to both Chaplin’s City Lights (1931) and Jean Delannoy’s French classic Pastoral Symphony (1946), but the end result is an inimitable product of Carax’s heart and soul, a disturbing vision of life always seeming to exist elsewhere that will haunt your subconsciousness for weeks.
Lauri Timonen